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A CINGHALESE GENTLEMAN 



GREATER BRITAIN: 



A BECOBD OF TBAVEL 



IN 



ENGLISH-SPEAKING COUNTRIES 



DURING 



1866 AND 1867. 



BY 



CHARLES WENTWORTH DILKE. 



WITH MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 



NEW YORK: 
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, 

FRANKLIN SQUARE, 

18 6 9. 



HAii 

II57 



Oftt from 
Mrs. Etta F. Winter 
Sept. ao 1932 " 



TO 

MY FATHER 

/ DEDICATE 
THIS BOOK. 



C. W. Do 



PREFACE. 



In 1866 and 1867 I followed England round the world ; 
everywhere I was in English-speaking, or in English-gov- 
erned lands. If I remarked that climate, soil, manners of 
life, that mixture with other peoples had -modified the 
blood, I saw, too, that in essentials the race was always 
one. 

The idea which in all the length of my travels has been 
at once my fellow and my guide — a key wherewith to un- 
lock the hidden things of strange new lands — is a concep- 
tion, however imperfect, of tne grandeur of our race, al- 
ready girdling the earth, which it is destined, perhaps, 
eventually to overspread. 

In America, the peoples of the world are being fused 
together, but they are run into an English mould : Alfred's 
laws and Chaucer's tongue are theirs whether they would 
or no. There are men who say that Britain in her age 
will claim the glory of having planted greater Englands 
across the seas. They fail to perceive that she has done 
more than found plantations of her own — that she has im- 
posed her institutions upon the offshoots of Germany, of 
Ireland, of Scandinavia, and of Spain. Through America 

England is speaking to the world. 

A 2 



X Pkeface. 

Sketches of Saxondom may be of interest even upon 
humbler grounds : the development of the England of 
Elizabeth is to be found, not in the Britain of Victoria, 
but in half the habitable globe. If two small islands are 
by courtesy styled " Great," America, Australia, India, 
must form a Greater Britain. 

C. W. D. 

7G Sloane Street, S.W., Ut November, 18G8. 



CONTENTS. 



PART I. 

OHAPr tagt: 

I. — Virginia 17 

II.— The Negro 27 

III.— The South «.... 35 

IV. — The Empire State 40 

V. — Cambridge Commencesient 47 

VI. — Canada '. 57 

VII. — University of Michigan , « C8 

VIII. — The Pacific Railroad 75 

IX. — Omphalism 82 

X. — Letter from Denver 85 

XI. — Ked Indian = 85 

XII. — Colorado 101 

XIII.— Rocky Mountains 104 

XIV.— Brigham Young 110 

XV. — Mormondom 114 

XVI. — Western Editors 117 

XVII.— Utah 127 

XVIII.— Nameless Alps 134 

XIX.— Virginia City 146 

XX.— El Dorado 156 

XXL— Lynch Law 167 

XXIL— Golden City 179 

XXIIL— Little China 188 

XXIV.— California 195 

XXV.— Mexico , 200 

XXVI. — Republican or Democrat 204 

XXVIL— Brothers 215 

XXVIII.— America 220 



xii CONTEI^TS. 



PART II. 

CHAP. PAGE 

I. — PiTCAiRN Island 228 

11. — HOKITIKA 233 

III. — Polynesians 246 

IV. — Parewanui Pah 251 

v.— The Maories 266 

VL— The Two Flies......... 273 

VIL— The Pacific 278 



PART III. 

I.— Sydney '. 282 

IL — Rival Colonies 288 

III.— Victoria 294 

IV. — Squatter Aristocracy 307 

V. — Colonial Democracy ^..... 312 

VL — Protection 320 

VIL— Labor .". -. 328 

VIIL— Woman 336 

IX. — Victorian Ports - 339 

X.— Tasmania 342 

XL — Confederation 351 

XII. — Adelaide 354 

XIIL— Transportation 363 

XIV. — Australia 373 

XV.— Colonies 379 

PART IV. 

I. — Maritime Ceylon 886 

IL— Kandy 396 

III. — Madras to Calcutta 402 

IV.— Benares 409 

V. — Caste 415 

VI. — Mohammedan Cities 425 

VIL— Simla 433 

VIIL- — Colonization 445 

IX.— The «« Gazette" 451 

X. — Umritsur 458 

XL— Lahore 407 



Contents. xiii 

^AP. -PA6K 

XII. — Our Indian Abmy 470 

XIII. — KussiA 475 

XIV. — Native States 484 

XV.— SciNDE 493 

XVI. — Overland Koutes 500 

XVII.— Bombay 508 

XVIII. — The Mohukrum 513 

XIX. — English Learning 518 

XX. — India , 524 

XXI. — ^Dependencies 585 

XXII. — France in the East 539 

XXIII.— The English 545 

APPENDIX. 
A Maori Dinner 548 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 



VIEW FROM THE BULLEK . . ) _ . . ^^^^ 

.Frontispieces. 

A CINGHALESE GENTLEMAN ' 

PROFILE OF "JOE SMITH"... , - „„ 



full face of "joe smith 

porter rockwell 135 

Friday's station — valley of lake tahoe ) , „ , 

\. ib\ 

teaming up the grade at slippery ford, in the sierra ) 

view on the AMERICAN RIVER — THE PLACE WHERE GOLD WAS FIRST 

found 158 

the bridal veil fall, yosemite valley lot 

el capitan, yosemite valley 19c 

the old and the new : bush scenery — collins street east, mel- 
BOURNE 295 

GOVERNOR DAVEY'S PROCLAMATION 344 

MAPS. 

ATLANTIC AND PACIFIC RAILROAD 7G 

LEAVENWORTH TO SALT LAKE CITY 8G 

SALT LAKE CITY TO SAN FRANCISCO 138 

NEW ZEALAND 234 

AUSTRALIA AND TASMANIA 289 

OVERLAND ROUTES 501 



GREATER BRITAIN. 



PART I. — AMERICA. 



CHAPTER I. 

VIRGINIA. 



Fkom the bows of tlie steamer Saratoga, on the 20th 
June, 1866, I caught sight of the low works of Fortress Mon- 
roe, as, threading her way between the sand-banks of Capes 
Charles and Henry, our ship pressed on, under sail and steam, 
to enter Chesapeake Bay. 

Our sudden arrival amid shoals of sharks and king-fish, 
the keeping watch for flocks of canvas-back ducks, gave us 
enough and to spare of idle work till we fully sighted the 
Yorktown peninsula, overgrown with ancient memories — an- 
cient for America. Three towns of lost grandeur, or their 
ruins, stand there still. Williamsburg, the former capital, 
graced even to our time by the palaces where once the royal 
governors held more than regal state ; Yorktown, where 
Cornwallis surrendered to the Continental troops ; James- 
town, the earliest settlement, founded in 1607, thirteen years 
before old Governor Winthrop fixed the site of Plymouth, 
MassqfChusetts. 

A bump against the pier of Fortress Monroe soon roused 
us from our musings, and we found ourselves invaded by a 
swarm of stalwart negro troopers, clothed in the cavalry uni- 
form of the United States, who boarded us for the mails. 
Not a white man save those we brought was to be seen upon 
the pier, and the blazing sun made me thankful that I had 
declined an offered letter to Jeff. Davis. 

Pushing off again into the stream, we ran the gauntlet of 



18 Greater Britain. 

the Rij^-mps passage and made for Norfolk, ha-f^ig on our 
left the many exits of the Dismal Swamj) Canal. Crossing 
Hampton Roads — a grand bay with pleasant grassy shores, 
destined one day to become the best known, as by nature it 
is the noblest, of Atlantic jDorts — we nearly ran upon the 
Avrecks of the Federal frigates Cumberland and Congress, 
sunk by the rebel ram Meri'iraac in the first great naval action 
of the war ; but soon after, by a sort of poetic justice, we al- 
most drifted into the black hull of the Merrhnac herself. 
Great gangs of negroes were laboring laughingly at the re- 
niovrJ, by blasting, of the sunken ships. 

When we were securely moored at ISTorfolk pier, I set off 
upon an inspection of the second city of Virginia. Again not 
a white man was to be seen, but hundreds of negroes were 
working in the heat, building, repairing, road-making, and 
happily chattering the while. At' last, turning a corner, I 
came on a hotel, and, as a consequence, on a bar and its 
crowd of swaggering whites — " Johnny Rebs " all, you might 
see by the breadth of their brims, for across the Atlantic a 
broad-brim denotes less the man of peace than the ex-member 
of a Southern guerrilla band, Morgan's, Mosby's, or Stuart's. 
N^o Southerner will wear the Yankee " stove-pij^e '' hat; a 
Panama or Palmetto for him, he says, though he keeps to the 
long black coat that rules from Maine to the Rio Grande. 

These Southerners were all alike — all were upright, tall, 
and heavily mustached; all had long black hair and glitter- 
ing eyes, and I looked instinctively for the baldrick and ra- 
pier. It needed no second glance to assure me that, as far as 
the men of Norfolk were concerned, the saying of our Yankee 
skipper was not far from the truth : " The last idea that en- 
ters the mind of a Southerner is that of doing work." 

Strangers are scarce in Norfolk, and it was not long before 
I found an excuse for entering into conversation with the 
" citizens." My first question was not received with much 
cordiality by my new acquaintances. "How do the negroes 
work? Wall, we spells nigger with two 'g's,' I reckon." 
(Virginians, I must explain, are used to reckon as much as 
New Englanders to " guess," while Western men " calculate " 
as often as they cease to swear.) "How does the niggers 
work? Wall, niggers is darned fools, certain, but they ain't 



Virginia. . 19 

quite sich fools as to work Avhile the Yanks will feed 'em. 
No, sir, not quite sich fools as that." Hardly deeming it wise 
to point to the negroes working in the sun-blaze within a hun- 
dred yards, while we sat rocking ourselves in the veranda of 
the inn, I changed my tack, and asked whether things were 
settling down in ISTorfolk. This query soon led my friends 
upon the line I wanted them to take, and in five minutes we 
were Avell through politics, and plunging into the very war. 
"You're a Britisher. ITow, all that they tell you's darned 
lies. We're just as secesh as we ever was, only so niany's 
killed that we can't fight — that's all, I reckon." " We ain't 
going to fight the North and West again," said an ex-colonel 
of rebel mfantry ; " next time we fight, 'twill be us and the 
West against the Yanks. We'll keep the old flag then, and 
be darned to them." " If it hadn't been for the politicians, 
we shouldn't have seceded at all, I reckon : we should just 
have kept the old flag and the Constitution, and the Yanks 
would have seceded from us. Reckon we'd have let 'em go*" 
" Wall, boys, s'pose we liquor," closed in the colonel, shooting 
out his old quid, and filling in with another, " We'd have 
fought for a lifetime if the cussed Southerners hadn't desert- 
ed like they did." I asked who these " Southerners " were to 
whom such disrespect was being shown. " You didn't think 
Virginia was a Southern State over in Britain, did you ; 'cause 
Virginia's a Border State, sir. We didn't go to secede at all ; 
it was them blasted Southerners that brought it on us. First, 
they wouldn't give a command to General Robert E. Lee, 
then they made us do all the fighting for 'era, and then, when 
the pinch came, they left us in the lurch. Why, sir, I saw 
three Mississippi regiments surrender without a blow — yes, 
sir:, that's right down good whisky; jess you sample it." 
Here the steam-whistle of the Saratoga sounded, with its deep 
bray. " Reckon you'll have to hurry up to make connections," 
said one of my new friends, and I hurried off, not without a 
fear lest some of the group should shoot after me, to avenge 
the affront of my quitting them before the mixing of the 
drinks. They were but a pack of " mean whites," " North 
Carolina crackers," but their views were those which I found 
dominant in all ranks at Richmond, and up the country in 
Virginia. 



20 Greater Britain. 

After all, the Southern planters are not " The South," 
which for political purposes is composed of the " mean whites," 
of the Irish of the towns, and of the South-western men — ^JMis- 
sourians, Kentuckians, and Texans — fiercely anti-Northern, 
without being in sentiment what we should call Southern, 
certainly not representatives of the " Southern Chivalry." 
The " mean whites," or " poor trash," are the whites who are 
not planters — members of the slaveholding race who never 
held a slave — white men looked down upon by the negroes. 
It is a necessary result of the despotic government of one 
race by another that the poor members of the dominant peo- 
ple are universally despised : the " destitute Europeans " of 
Bombay, the "white loafers" of the Punjaub, are familiar 
cases. Where slavery exists, the " poor trash " class must 
inevitably be both large and wretched : primogeniture is nec- 
essary to keep the plantations sufficiently great to allow for 
the payment of overseers and the suj)porting in luxury of the 
planter family, and younger sons and their descendants are 
not only left destitute, but debarred from earning their bread 
by honest industry, for in a slave country labor is degrading. 

The Southern planters were gentlemen, possessed of many 
aristocratic virtues, along with every aristocratic vice ; but to 
each planter there were nine " mean whites," who, though 
grossly ignorant, full of insolence, given to the use of the 
knife and pistol upon the slightest provocation, were, until the 
election of Lincoln to the presidency, as completely the rulers 
of America as they were afterward the leaders of the re- 
bellion. 

At sunset we started up the James on our way to City 
Point and Richmond, sailing almost between the very masts 
of the famous rebel privateer the Florida^ and seeing her as 
she lay under the still, gray waters. She was cut out from 
a Brazilian port, and when claimed by the imperial government 
was to have been at once surrendered. While the dispatches 
were on their way to Norfolk, she was run into at her moor- 
ings by a Federal gun-boat, and filled and sank directly. 
Friends of the Confederacy have hinted that the collision was 
strangely opportune ; nevertheless, the fact remains that the 
commander of the gun-boat was dismissed the navy for his 
carelessness. 



YlRGINIA. 21 

The twilight was beyond description lovely. The change 
from the auks and ice-birds of the Atlantic to the blue-birds 
and robins of Virginia was not more sudden than that from 
Avinter to tropical warmth and sensuous indolence ; but the 
scenery, too, of the river is beautiful in its very changeless- 
ness. Those who can see no beauty but in boldness, might 
call the James as monotonous as the Lower Loire. 

After weeks of bitter cold, warm evenings favor meditation. 
The soft air, the antiquity of the forest, the languor of the 
sunset breeze, all dispose to dream and sleep. That oak has 
seen Powhatan; the founders of Jamestown may have point- 
ed at that grand old sycamore. In this drowsy humor, we 
sighted the far-famed batteries of N^ewport ISTews, and, turn- 
ing in to berth or hammock, lay all night at City Point, near 
Petersburg. 

A little before sunrise we weighed again, and sought a 
passage through the tremendous Confederate " obstructions." 
Rows of iron skeletons, the frame-works of the wheels of 
sunken steamers, showed above the stream, casting gaunt 
shadows westward, and varied only by here and there a bat- 
tered smoke-stack or a spar. The whole of the steamers that 
had plied upon the James and the canals before the war were 
lying here in rows, sunk lengthwise along the stream. Two in 
the middle of each row had been raised to let the Government 
vessels pass, but in the heat-mist and faint light the naviga- 
tion was most difficult. For five-and-twenty miles the rebel 
forts were as thick as the hills and points allowed ; yet, in 
spite of booms and bars, of sunken ships, of batteries and 
torpedoes, the Federal Monitors once forced their way to Fort 
Darling, in the outer works of Richmond. I remembered 
these things a few weeks later, when General Grant's first 
words to me at Washington were, " Glad to meet you. What 
have you seen ?" " The Caj^itol." " Go at once and see the 
Monitors." He afterward said to me, in words that photo- 
graph not only the Monitors, but Grant, "You can batter 
away at those things for a month, and do no good." 

At Dutch Gap we came suddenly upon a curious scene. 
The river flowed toward us down a long straight reach, bound- 
ed by a lofty hill crowned with tremendous earth-works ; but 
through a deep trench or cleft, hardly fifty yards in length, 



22 Greater Britain. 

upon our right, we could see the stream running with violence 
in fi direction parallel with our course. The hills about the 
gully were hollowed out into caves and bomb-proofs, evident- 
ly meant as shelters from vertical fire, but the rough graves 
of a vast cemetery showed that the protection was sought in 
vain. Forests of crosses of unpainted wood rose upon every 
acre of flat ground. On the peninsula, all but made an island 
by the cleft, was a grove of giant trees, leafless, barkless, dead, 
and blanched by a double change in the level of the stream. 
There is no sight so sad as that of a drowned forest, with a 
turkey-buzzard on each bough. On the bank upon our left 
was an iron scaffold, eight or ten stories high — "Butler's 
Lookout," as the cleft was " Butler's Dutch Gap Canal." The 
canal, unfinished in war, is now to be completed at state ex- 
pense for purposes of trade. 

As we rounded the extremity of the peninsula, an eagle 
was seen to light upon a tree. From every portion of the 
ship — main-deck, hurricane-deck, lower-deck ports — revolvers 
ready capped and loaded were brought to bear upon the 
bird, which sheered off unharmed amid a storm of bullets. 
After this incident, I was careful in my political discussions 
with my shipmates ; disarmament in the Confederacy had 
clearly not been extended to private weapons. 

The outer and inner lines of fortifications passed, we came 
in view of a many-steepled town, with domes and spires recall- 
ing Oxford, hanging on a bank above a crimson-colored, foam- 
ing stream. In ten miimtes we were alongside the wharf at 
Richmond, and in half an hour safely housed in the "Ex- 
change " Hotel, kept by the Messrs. Carrington, of whom the 
father was a private, the son a colonel, in the rebel volun- 
teers. 

The next day, while the works and obstructions on the 
James were still fresh in my mind, I took train to Petersburg, 
the city the capture of which by Grant was the last blow 
struck by the N'orth at the melting forces of the Confederacy. 

The line showed the war : here and there the track, torn up 
in ISTorthern raids, had barely been repaired ; the bridges 
were burnt and broken; the rails worn down to an iron 
thread. The joke "on board," as they say here for "in the 
train," was that the engine-drivers down the line are tolera- 



Virginia. 23 

bly 'cute men, Avho, when the rails are altogether worn away, 
understand how to " go it on the Ipare wood," and who at all 
times " know where to jump." 

From the window of the car we could see that in the coun- 
try there were left no mules, no horses, no roads, no men. 
The solitude is not all owing to the war. In the whole five- 
and-twenty miles from Richmond to Petersburg there was be- 
fore the war but a single station ; in ]^ew England your pas- 
sage-card often gives a station in every two miles. A careful 
look at the underwood on either side the line showed that this 
forest is not primeval, that all this country had once been 
plowed. 

Virginia stands first among the States for natural advanta- 
ges : in climate she is unequalled ; her soil is fertile ; her min- 
eral wealth in coal, copper, gold, and iron, enormous and well 
placed ; her rivers good, and her great harbor one of the best 
in the world. Virginia has been planted more than 250 years, 
and is as large as England, yet has a. free population of only 
a million. In every kind of production she is miserably infe- 
rior to Missouri or Ohio, in most inferior also to the infant 
States of Michigan and Illinois. Only a quarter of her soil is 
under cultivation, to half that of poor starved New England, 
and the mines are deserted which were worked by the very 
Indians who were driven from the land as savages a hundred 
years ago. 

There is no surer test of the condition of a country than 
the state of its highways. In driving on the main roads round 
Richmond, in visiting the scene of M'Clellan's great defeat 
on the Chickahominy at Mechanicsville and Malvern Hill, I 
myself and an American gentleman who was with me had to 
get out and lay the planks upon the bridges, and then sit upon 
them, to keep them down while the black coachman drove 
across. The best roads in Virginia are but ill-kept "cordu- 
roys ;" but, bad as are these, " plank roads " over which artil- 
lery has passed, knocking out every other plank, are worse by 
far; yet such is the main road from Richmond toward the 
West. 

There is not only a scarcity of roads, but of railroads. A 
comparison of the railway system of Illinois and Indiana with 
the two lines of Kentucky, or the one of Western Virginia or 



24 Greatek Britain. 

Louisiana, is a comparison of the South with the North, of 
slavery with freedom. Virginia shows ah*eady the decay of 
age, but is blasted by slavery rather than by war. 

Passing through Petersburg, the streets of which were gay 
with the feathery-brown blooms of the Venetian sumac, but 
almost deserted by human beings, who have not returned to 
the city since they were driven out by the shot and shell of 
which their houses show the scars, we were soon in the rebel 
works. There are sixty miles of these works in all, line with- 
in line, three deep : alternations of sand-pits and sand-heaps, 
with here and there a tree-trunk pierced for riflemen, and 
everywhere a double row of chevaux-de-frise. The forts near- 
est this point were named by their rebel occupants Fort Hell 
and Fort Damnation. Tremendous works, but it needed no 
long interview with Grant to understand their capture. I had 
not been ten minutes in his office at Washmgton before I saw 
that the secret of his unvarying success lay in his unflinching 
determination; there is pith in the American conceit which 
reads in his initials, " U. S. G.," " Unconditional-surrender 
Grant." 

The works defending Richmond, hardly so strong as those 
of Petersburg, were attacked in a novel manner in the third 
year of the war. A strong body of Federal cavalry on a raid, 
unsupported by infantry or guns, came suddenly by night 
upon the outer lines of Richmond on the west. Something 
had led them to believe that the rebels were not in force, and 
with the strange aimless daring that animated both parties 
during ^the rebellion, they rode straight in along the w^inding 
road unchallenged, and came up to the inner lines. There 
they were met by a volley which emptied a few saddles, and 
they retired, without even stopping to spike the guns in the 
outer works. Had they known enough of the troops opposed 
to them to have continued to advance, they might have taken 
Richmond, and held it long enough to have captured the rebel 
President and Senate, and burned the great iron-works and 
ships. The whole of the rebel army had gone north, and even 
the home guard was camped out on the Chickahominy. The 
troops who fired the volley were a company of the " iron- works 
battalion," boys employed at the founderies, not one of whom 
had ever fired a rifle before this night. They confessed them- 



Virginia. 25 

selves that " one minute more, and they'd have run ;" but the 
volley just stopped the enemy in time. 

The spot where we first struck the rebel lines was that 
known as the Crater — the funnel-shaped cavity formed when 
Grant sprang his famous mine. Fifteen hundred men are bur- 
ied in the hollow itself, and the bones of those smothered by 
*the falling earth are working through the soil. Five thousand 
negro troops were killed in this attack, and are buried round 
the hollow where they died, fighting as gallantly as they fought 
everywhere throughout the war. It is a singular testimony 
to the continuousness of the fire, that the still remaining sub- 
terranean passages show that in countermining the rebels came 
once within three feet of the mine, yet failed to hear the work- 
ing-parties. Thousands of old army-shoes were lying on the 
earth, and negro boys were digging up bullets for old lead. 

Withia eighty yards of the Crater are the Federal invest- 
ing lines, on which the trumpet-flower of our gardens was 
growing wild, in deep, rich masses. The negroes told me not 
to gather it, because they believe it scalds the hand. They 
call it " poison-plant," or " blister-weed." The blue-birds and 
scarlet tannagers were playing about the horn-shaped flowers. 

Just within Grant's earth- works are the ruins of an ancient 
church, built, it is said, with bricks that were brought by the 
first colonists from England in 1614. About ISTorf oik, about 
Petersburg, and the Shenandoah Valley, you can not ride twen- 
ty miles through the Virginian forest without bursting in upon 
some glade containing a quaint old church, or a creeper-cover- 
ed roofless palace of the Culpeppers, the Randolphs, or the 
Scotts. The county names have in them all a history. Tak- 
ing the letter " B " alone, we have Barbour, Bath, Bedford, 
Berkeley, Boone, Botetourt, Braxton, Brooke, Brunswick, Bu- 
chanan, Buckingham. A dozen counties in the State are named 
from kings or princes. The slave-owning cavaliers whose 
names the remainder bear are the men most truly guilty of 
the latS attempt made by their descendants to create an em- 
pire founded on disloyalty and oppression; but within sight 
of this old church of theirs at Petersburg, thirty-three miles of 
Federal outworks stand as a monument of how the attempt 
was crushed by the children of their N'ew England brother- 
colonists. 

B 



26 Greater Britain. 

The names of streams and hamlets in Virginia have often a 
quaint English ring. On the Potomac, near Harper's Ferry, 
I once came upon " Sir John's Run." Upon my asking a 
tall, gaunt fellow who was fishing whether this was the spot 
on which the Knight of Windsor " larded the lean earth," I 
got for sole answer, " Wall, don't know 'bout that, but it's a 
mighty fine spot for yellow-fin trout." The entry to Virginia 
is characteristic. You sail between capes named from the 
sons of James I., and have fronting you the estuaries of two 
rivers called after the king and the Duke of York. 

The old " F. F. V.'s," the first families of Virginia, whose 
founders gave these monarchic names to the rivers and coun- 
ties of the State, are far off now in Texas and California — 
those, that is, which were not extinct before the war. The 
tenth Lord Fairfax keeps a tiny ranch near San Francisco; 
some of the chief Denmans are also to be found in California. 
In all such cases of which I heard, the emigration took* place 
before the war ; Northern conquest could not be made use of 
as a plea whereby to escape the rej^roaches due to the slave- 
owning system. There is a stroke of justice in the fact that 
the Virginian oligarchy have ruined themselves in ruining 
their State ; but the gaming-hells of Farobankopolis, as Rich- 
mond once was called, have much for which to answer. 

When the " burnt district " comes to be rebuilt, Richmond 
will be the most beautiful of all the Atlantic cities ; while the 
water-power of the rapids of the James and its situation at 
the junction of canal and river, secure for it a prosperous fu- 
ture. 

The superb position of the State-house (which formed the 
rebel Capitol), on the brow of a long-hill, whence it overhangs 
the city and the James, has in it something of satire. The 
•Parliament-house of George Washington's own State, the 
State-house, contains the famed statue set up by the general 
assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia to the hero's mem- 
ory. Without the building stands the still more noteworthy 
bronze statue of the first President, erected jointly by all the 
States in the then Union. That such monuments should over- 
look the battle-fields of the war provoked by the secession from 
the Union of Washington's loved Virginia, is a fact full of 
the grim irony of history. 



The Negro. 27 

Hollywood, the cemetery of Riclimond, is a place full of 
touching sad suggestions, and very beautiful, with deep shades 
and rippling streams. During the war, there were hospitals 
in Richmond for 20,000 men, and " always full," they say. 
The Richmond men who were killed in battle were buried 
where they fell, but 8000 who died in hospital are buried here, 
and over them is placed a wooden cross, with the inscription 
in black paint, " Dead, but not forgotten." In another spot 
lie the Union dead, under the shadoAV of the flag for which 
they died. 

From Monroe's tomb the evening view is singularly soft 
and calm ; the quieter and calmer f er the drone in which are 
mingled the trills of the mocking-bird, the hoarse croaking of 
the buU-frog, the hum of the myriad fire-flies, that glow like 
summer lightning among the trees ; the distant roar of the 
river, of which the rich red water can still be seen, beaten by 
the rocks into a rosy* foam. 

With the moment's chillness of the sunset breeze, the gold- 
en glory of the heavens fades into gray, and there comes quick- 
ly over them the solemn blueness of the Southern night. 
Thoughts are springing up of the many thousand unnamed 
graves, where the rebel soldiers lie unknown, when the Federal 
drums in Richmond begin sharply beating the rappel. 



CHAPTER H. 

THE NEGEO. 

In the back country of Virginia, and on the borders of 
North Carolina, it becomes clear that our common English 
notions of the negro and of slavery are nearer the truth than 
common notions often are. The London Christy Minstrels 
are not more given to bursts of laughter of the form " Yah ! 
yah !" than are the plantation-hands. The negroes upon the 
Virginian farms are not maligned by those who represent 
them as delighting in the contrasts of crimson and yellow, or 
emerald and sky-blue. I have seen them on a Sunday after- 
noon, dressed in scarlet waistcoats and gold-laced cravats, re- 
turning hurriedly from " meetin'," to dance break-downs, and 



28 Greater Britain. 

grin from ear to ear for hours at a time. What better should 
we expect from men to whom until just now it was forbidden, 
under tremendous penalties, to teach their letters ? 

Nothing can force the planters to treat negro freedom save 
from the comic side. To them the thing is too new for 
thought, too strange for argument ; the ridiculous lies on the 
surface, and to this they turn as a relief. When I asked a 
planter how the blacks prospered under freedom, his answer 
was, " Ours don't much like it. You see, it necessitates mo- 
nogamy. If I talk about the 'responsibilities of freedom,' 
Sambo says, *Dunno 'bout that; please Mass' George, me 
want two wife.' " Anotjier planter tells me that the only 
change that he can see in the condition of the negroes since 
they have been free, is that formerly the supervision of the 
overseer forced them occasionally to be clean, whereas now 
nothing on earth can make them wash. He says that, writing 
lately to his agent, he received an answer to which there was 
the following postscript : " You ain't sent no sope. You had 
better send sope : niggers is certainly needing sope." 

It is easy to treat the negro question in this way ; "easy, 
on the other hand, to assert that since history fails us as a 
guide to the future of the emancipated blacks, we should see 
what time will bring, and meanwhile set down negroes as a 
monster class of which nothing is yet known, and, like the 
compilers of the Catalan map, say of places of which we have 
no knowledge, " Here be giants, cannibals, and negroes." As 
long as we possess Jamaica, and are masters upon the African 
west coast, the negro question is one of moment to ourselves. 
It is one, too, of mightier import, for it is bound up with the 
future of the EngUsh in America. It is by no means a ques- 
tion to be passed over as a joke. There are five millions of 
negroes in the United States ; juries throughout ten States of 
the Union are mainly chosen from the black race. The mat- 
ter is not only serious, but full of interest, political, ethno- 
logical, historic. 

In the South you must take nothing upon trust, believe 
nothing you are told. Nowhere in the world do " facts " ap- 
pear so differently to those who view them through spectacles 
of yellow or of rose. The old planters tell you that all is 
ruin, that they have but half the hands they need, and from 



The Negro. 29 

eacli hand but a half -day's work ; the new men, with ISTorth- 
ern energy and Northern capital, tell you that they get on 
very well. 

The old Southern planters find it hard to rid themselves of 
their traditions ; they can not understand free blacks, and 
slavery makes not only the slaves but the masters shiftless. 
They have no cash, and the Metayer system gives risfe to the 
suspicion of some fraud, for the negroes are very distrustful 
of the honesty of their former masters. 

The worst of the evils that must inevitably grow out of 
the sudden emancipation of millions of slaves have not shown 
themselves as yet, in consequence of the great amount of work 
that has to be done in the cities of the South, in repairing 
the ruin caused during the war by fire and want of care, and 
in building places of business for the Northern capitalists. 
The negroes of Virginia and North Carolina have flocked down 
to the towns and ports by the thousand, and find in Norfolk, 
Richmond, Wilmington, and Fortress Monroe employment 
for the moment. Their absence from the plantations makes 
labor dear up country, and this in itself tempts the negroes 
who remain on land to work sturdily for wages. Seven dol- 
lars a month — at the then rate equal to one pound — with 
board and lodging, were being paid to black field-hands on 
the corn and tobacco farms near Richmond. It is when the 
city works are over that the pressure will come, and it will 
probably end in the blacks largely pushing northward, and 
driving the Irish out of h6tel service at New York and Bos- 
ton, as they have done in Philadelphia and St. Louis. 

Already the negroes are beginning to ask for land, and 
they complain loudly that none of the confiscated lands have 
been assigned to them. " Ef yer dun gib us de land, reckon 
de ole massas '11 starb de niggahs," was a j)lain, straightfor- 
ward summary of the negro view of the negro question, given 
me by a white-bearded old " uncle" in Richmond, and backed 
by every black man within hearing in a chorus of " Dat's true, 
for shore ;" but I found up the country that the planters are 
afraid to let the negroes own or farm for themselves the 
smallest plot of land, for fear that they should sell ten times 
as much as they grew, stealing their " crop " from the grana- 
ries of their employers. 



80 Greater Britain. 

Upon a farm near Petersburg, owned by a ISTorthern capi- 
talist, I was told that 1000 acres, which before emancipation 
had been tilled by 100 slaves, now needed but forty freedmen 
for its cultivation ; but when I reached it, I found that the 
former number included old people and women, while the 
forty were all hale men. The men were paid upon the tally 
system. A card was given them for each day's work, which 
was accepted at the plantation store in payment for goods 
supplied, and at the end of the month money was paid for the 
remaining tickets. The planters say that the field-hands will 
not support their old people ; but this means only that, like 
white folk, they try to make as much money as they can, and 
know that if they plead the wants of their own wives and 
children, the whites will keep their old people. 

That the negro slaves were lazy, thriftless, unchaste, thieves, 
is true ; but it is as slaves, and not as negroes, that they were 
all these things ; and, after all, the effects of slavery upon the 
slave are less terrible than its effects upon the master. The 
moral condition to which the planter class had been brought 
by slavery shows out plainly in the speeches of the rebel lead- 
ers. Alexander H. Stephens, Vice-president of the Confed- 
eracy, declared in 1861 that " Slavery is the natural and mor- 
al condition of the negro. ... I can not permit myself to 
doubt," he went on, " the ultimate success of a full recogni- 
tion of this principle throughout the civilized and enlighten- 
ed world . . . . ; negro slavery is in its infancy." 

There is reason to believe that the American negroes will 
justify the hopes of their best friends : they have made the 
best of every chance that has been given them yet ; they made 
good soldiers, they are eager to learn their letters, they are 
steady at their work. In Barbadoes they are industrious and 
well-conducted ; in La Plata they are exemplary citizens. In 
America, as yet, the colored laborer has had no motive to be 
industrious. 

General Grant assured me of the great aptness at soldier- 
ing shown by the negro trooj)S. In battle they displayed ex- 
traordinary courage, but if their officers were picked off they 
could not stand a charge ; no more, he said, could their South- 
ern masters. The power of standing firm after the loss of 
leaders is possessed only by regiments where every private is 



The Negro. 81 

as good as his captain and colonel, such as the North-western 
and New England volunteers. 

Before I left Richmond, I had one morning found my way 
into a school for the younger blacks. There were as many 
present as the forms would hold — sixty, perhaps, in all — and 
three wounded New England soldiers, with pale, thin faces, 
were patiently teaching them to write. The boys seemed 
quick and apt enough, but they were very raw — only a week 
or two in the school. Since the time when Oberlin first pro- 
claimed the potential equality of the race, by admitting ne- 
groes as freely as white men and women to the college, the 
negroes have never been backward to learn. 

It must not be supposed that the negro is wanting in abili- 
ties of a certain kind. Even in the imbecility of the Congo 
dance we note his unrivalled mimetic powers. The religious 
side of the negro character is full of weird suggestiveness ; 
but superstition, everywhere the handmaid of ignorance, is 
rife among the black plantation-hands. It is thought that the 
punishment with which the shameful rites of Obi -worship 
have been visited has proved, even in the city of New Orleans, in- 
sufficient to prevent them. Charges of witchcraft are as com- 
mon in Virginia as in Orissa : in the Carolinas, as in Central 
India, the .use of poison is often sought to work out the events 
foretold by some noted sorceress. In no direction can the mat- 
ter be followed out to its conclusions without bringing us face 
to face with the sad fact, that the faults of the plantation negro 
are every one of them traceable to the vices of the slavery sys- 
tem, and that the Americans of to-day are suffering beyond 
measure for evils for which our forefathers are responsible. 
We ourselves are not guiltless of wrong-doing in this matter : 
if it is still impossible openly to advocate slavery in England, 
it has, at least, become a habit persistently to write down free- 
dom. We are no longer told that God made the blacks to be 
slaves, but we are bade remember that they can not prosper 
under emancipation. All mention of Barbadoes is suppressed, 
but we have daily homilies on the condition of Jamaica. The 
negro question in America is briefly this : Is there, on the 
one hand, reason to fear that, dollars applied to land decreas- 
ing while black mouths to be fed increase, the Southern States 
will become an American Jamaica? Is there, on the other 



32 Gkeater Britain. 

hand, ground for the hope that the negroes may be found not 
incapable of the citizenship of the United States ? The form- 
er of these two questions is the more difficult, and, to some ex- 
tent, involves the latter : can cotton, can sugar, can rice, can 
coffee, can tobacco, be raised by white field-hands ? If not, 
can they be raised with profit by black free labor ? Can co- 
operative planting, directed by negro overlookers, possibly suc- 
ceed, or must the farm be ruled by white capitalists, agents, 
and overseers ? 

It is asserted that the negro will not work without comjDul- 
sion, but the same may be said of the European. There is 
compulsion of many kinds. The emancipated negro may 
still be forced to work — forced as the white man is forced in 
this and other lands by the alternative, work or starve ! This 
forcing, however, may not be confined to that which the laws 
of natural increase lead us to expect ; it may be stimulated by 
bounties on immio^ration. 

The negro is not, it would seem, to have a monopoly of 
Southern labor in this continent. This week we hear of three 
shiploads of Chinese coolies as just landed in Louisiana ; and 
the air is thick with rumors of labor from Bombay, from Cal- 
cutta, from the Pacific Islands — of Eastern labor in its hundred 
shaj)es — ^not to speak of competition with the whites,.now com- 
mencing with the German immigration into Tennessee. , 

The berries of this country are so large, so many, so full of 
juice, that alone they form a never-failing source of nourish- 
ment to an idle population. Three kinds of cranberries, 
American, pied, and English ; two blackberries, huckleberries, 
high-bush and low-bush blueberries — ^the latter being the En- 
glish bilberry — are among the best known of the native fruits. 
'No one in this country, however idle he be, need starve. If he 
goes farther south, he has the banana, the true staff of life. 

The terrible results of the plentiful possession of this tree 
are seen in Ceylon, at Panama, in the coast-lands of Mexico, at 
Auckland, in New Zealand. At Pitcairn's Island the plantain 
grove has beaten the missionary from the field ; there is much 
lip-Christianity, but no practice to be got from a people who 
possess the fatal plant. The much-abused cocoanut can not 
come near it as a devil's agent. The cocoa-palm is confined 
to a few islands and coast tracts — confined, too, to the tropics 



The Negro. 83 

and sea-level ; the plantain and banana extend over seventy- 
degrees of latitude, down to Botany Bay and King George's 
Sound, and up as far north as the Khyber Pass. The palm 
asks labor — not much, it is true ; but still a few days' hard 
work in the year in trenching, and climbing after the nuts. 
The plantain grows as a weed, and hangs down its branches 
of ripe tempting-fruit into your lap, as you lie in its cool 
shade. The cocoanut-tree has a hundred uses, and urges man 
to work to make spirit from its juice, ropes, clothes, matting, 
bags from its fibre, oil from the pulp ; it creates an export 
trade which appeals to almost all men by their weakest side, 
in offering large and quick returns for a little work. John 
Ross's " Isle of Cocoas," to the west of Java and south of 
Ceylon, yields him. heavy gains; there are profits to be made 
upon the Liberian coast, and even in Southern India and Cey- 
lon. The plantain will make nothing ; you can eat it raw or 
fried, and that is all ; you can eat it every day of your life 
without becoming tired of its taste ; without suffering in 
your health, you can live on it exclusively. In the banana 
groves of Florida and Louisiana there lurks much trouble and 
danger to the American Free States. 

The negroes have hardly much chance in Virginia against 
the ISTorthern capitalists, provided with white labor, but the 
States of Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, and South Carolina 
promise to be wholly theirs. Already they are flocking to 
places in which they have a majority of the people, and can 
control the municipalities and defend themselves, if neces- 
sary, by force ; but even if the Southerners of the coast desert 
their country, the negroes will not have it to themselves, un- 
less nature declares that they shall. ISTew Englanders will 
pour in with capital and energy, and cultivate the land by 
free black or by coolie labor, if either will pay. If they do 
pay, competition will force the remaining blacks to work or 
starve. 

The friends of the negro are not without a fear that the la- 
borers will be too many for their work, for, while the older 
Cotton States appear to be worn out, the new, such as Texas 
and Tennessee, will be reserved by public opinion to the whites. 
For the present the negroes will be masters in seven of the 
rebel States ; but in Texas, white men — English, Germans, 

B2 



84 Greater Britain. 

Danes — arc growing cotton with success ; and in Georgia and 
North CaroUna, which contain mountain districts, the negro 
power is not Ukely to be permanent. 

We may, perhaps, lay it down as a general principle that, 
when the negro can fight his way through opposition, and 
stand alone as a farmer or laborer without the aid of private 
or State charity, then he should be protected in the position 
he has shown himself worthy to hold, that of a free citizen of 
an enlightened and laboring community. Where it is found 
that when his circumstances have ceased to be exceptional the 
negro can not live unassisted, there the Federal Government 
may fairly and wisely step in and say, " We will not keep you, 
but we will carry you to Liberia or to Hayti, if you will." 

It is clear that the Southern negroes must be given a deci- 
sive voice in the appointment of the Legislatures by which 
they are to be ruled, or that the North must be prepared to 
back up by force of opinion, or, if need be, by force of arms, 
the Federal Executive, when it insists on the Civil Rights 
Bill being set in action at the South. Government through 
the negroes is the only way to avoid government through an 
army, which would be dangerous to the freedom of the North. 
It is safer for America to trust her slaves than to trust her 
rebels — safer to enfranchise than to pardon. 

A reading and writing basis for the suffrage in the South- 
ern States is an absurdity. Coupled with pardons to the reb- 
els, it would allow the " boys in gray " — the soldiers of the 
Confederacy — ^to control nine States of the Union ; it would 
render the education of the freedmen hoj)eless. For the mo- 
ment it would entirely disenfranchise the negroes in six States, 
whereas it is exactly for the moment that negro suffrage is in 
these States necessary ; while, if the rebels were admitted to 
vote, 'and the negroes excluded from the poll, the Southern 
representatives, united with the Copperhead wing of the Dem- 
ocratic party, might prove to be strong enough to repudiate 
the Federal debt. This is one of a dozen dangers. 

An education basis for the suffrage, though i^retended to 
be impartial, would be manifestly aimed against the negroes, 
and would perpetuate the antipathy of color to which the war 
is supposed to have put an end. To education such a provis- 
ion would be a death-blow. If the negroes were to vote as 



The South. 85 

soon as they could read, it is certain that the planters would 
take good care that they never should read at all. 

That men should be able to examine into the details of pol- 
itics is not entirely necessary to the working of representative 
government. It is sufficient that they should be competent to 
select men to do it for them. In the highest form of repre- 
sentative government, where all the electors are both intelli- 
gent, educated, and alive to the politics of the time, then the 
member returned must tend more and more to be a delegate. 
That has always been the case with the ISTorthern and Western 
members in America, but never with those returned by the 
Southern States ; and so it wiU continue, whether the South- 
ern elections be decided by negroes or by " mean whites." 

In Warren County, Mississippi, near Vicksburg, is a plan- 
tation which belongs to Joseph Davis, the brother of the rebel 
President. This he has leased to Mr. Montgomery — once his 
slave — ^in order that an association of blacks may be formed 
to cultivate the plantation on co-operative principles. It is to 
be managed by a council, to be elected by the community at 
large, and a voluntary poor-rate and embankment-rate are to 
be levied on the people by themselves. 

It is only a year since the termination of the war, and the 
negroes are already in possession of schools, village corpora- 
tions, of the Metayer system, of co-operative farms ; all tjiis 
tells of rapid advance, and the conduct and circulation of the 
New Orleans Tribune^ edited and j)ublished by negroes, and 
selling 10,000 copies daily, and another 10,000 of the weekly 
issue, speaks well for the progress of the blacks. If the 
Montgomery experiment succeeds, their future is secure. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE SOUTH. 



The political forecasts and opinions which were given me 
upon plantations were, in a great measure, those indicated in 
my talk with the Norfolk " loafers." On the history of the 
commencement of the rebellion there was singular unanimity. 
" Virginia never meant to quit the Union ; we were cheated 



36 Geeater Britain. 

by those rascals of the South. When we did go out, we were 
left to do all the fighting. Why, sir, I've seen a Mississippian 
division run away from a single Yankee regiment." 

As I heard much the same story from the North Carolin- 
ians that I met, it would seem as though there was httle union 
among the seceding States. The legend upon the first of all 
the secession flags that were hoisted was typical of this devo- 
tion to the fortunes of the State : " Death to Abolitionists ; 
South Carolina goes it alone ;" and during the whole war, it 
was not the rebel colors, but the palmetto emblem, or other 
State devices, that the ladies wore. 

About the war itself but little is said, though here and 
there I met a man who would tell camp stories in the l!^orth- 
ern style. One planter who had been " out " himself went so 
far as to say to me, " Our oflicers were good, but considering 
that our rank and file were just ' white-trash,' and that they 
had to fight regiments of New England Yankee volunteers, 
with all their best blood in the ranks, and Western sharp- 
shooters together, it's only wonderful .how we weren't whip- 
ped sooner." 

As for the future, the planter's policy is a simple one: 
" Reckon we're whipped, so we go in now for the old flag ; 
only those Yankee rogues must give us the control of our own 
people." The one result of the war has been, as they be- 
lieve, the abolition of slavery ; otherwise the situation is un- 
changed. The war is over, the doctrine of secession is al- 
lowed to fall into the background, and the ex-rebels claim to 
step once more into their former place, if, indeed, they admit 
that they ever left it. 

Every day that you are in the South you come more and 
more to see that the " mean whites " are the controlling pow- 
er. The landowners are not only few in number, but their 
apathy during the jDresent crisis is surprising. The men who 
demand their readmission to the government of eleven States 
are unkempt, fierce-eyed fellows, not one whit better than the 
brancos of Brazil ; the very men, strangely enough, who them- 
selves, in their " Leavenworth Constitution," first began dis- 
franchisement, declaring that the qualification for electors in 
the new State of Kansas should be the taking oath to uphold 
the infamous Fugitive Slave Law. 



The South. 87 

These " mean whites " were the men who brought about 
secession. The planters are guiltless of every thing but crim- 
inal indifference to the acts that were committed in their 
name. Secession was the act of a pack of noisy demagogues ; 
but a false idea of honor brought round a majority of the 
Southern people, and the infection of enthusiasm carried over 
the remainder. 

When the war sprang up, the old Southern contempt for 
the Yankees broke out into a fierce burst of joy that the day 
had come for paying off old scores. " We hate them, sir," 
said an old planter to me. "I wish to God that the May- 
flower had sunk with all hands in Plymouth Bay." 

Along with this violence of language there is a singular 
kind of cringing to the conquerors. Time after time I heard 
the complaint, " The Yankees treat us shamefully, I reckon. 
We come back to the Union, and give in on every point ; we 
renounce slavery, we consent to forget the past, and yet they 
won't restore us to our rights." Whenever I came to ask 
what they meant by " rights," I found the same haziness that 
everywhere surxounds that word. The Southerners seem to 
think that men may rebel and fight to the death against their 
country, and then, being beaten, lay down their arms and 
walk quietly to the polls along with law-abiding citizens, se- 
cure in the protection of the Constitution which for years 
they had fought to subvert. 

At Richmond I had a conversation which may serve as a 
specimen of what one hears each moment from the planters. 
An old gentleman with whom I was talking politics opened at 
me suddenly : " The Radicals are going to give the ballot to 
our niggers to strengthen their party, but they know better 
than to give it to their E'orthern niggers." 

D. " But surely there's a difference in the cases." 

The Pla:ntee. " You're right — there is ; but not your way. 
The difference is, that the Northern niggers can read and 
write, and even lie v/ith consistency, and ours can't." 

D. " But there's the wider difference, that negro suffrage 
down here is a necessity, unless you are to rule the country 
that's just beaten you." 

The Planter. " Well, there of course we differ. We rebs 
say we fought to take our States out of the Union. The 



S8 Greater Britain. 

Yanks beat us ; so our States must still be in the Union. If 
so, why shouldn't our representatives be unconditionally ad- 
mitted ?" 

Nearer to a conclusion we of course did not come, he de- 
claring that no man ought to vote who had not education 
enough to understand the Constitution, I that this was good 
primdfacie evidence against letting him vote, but that it might 
be rebutted by the proof of a higher necessity for his voting. 
As a planter said to me, " The Southerners prefer soldier rule 
to nigger rule ;" but it is not a question of what they prefer, 
but of what course is necessary for the safety of the Union 
which they fought to destroy. 

ISTowhere in the Southern States did I find any expectation 
of a fresh rebellion. It is only Englishmen who ask whether 
" the South " will not fight " once more." The South is dead 
and gone ; there can never be a " South " again, but only so 
many Southern States. " The South " meant simply the slave 
country : and slavery being dead, it is dead. Slavery gave 
but two classes besides the negroes — planters and "mean 
whites." The great planters were but a few thousand in num- 
ber ; they are gone to Canada, England, Jamaica, California, 
Colorado, Texas. The " mean whites " — the true South — are 
impossible in the face of free labor : they must work or starve. 
If they work, they will no longer be " mean whites," but es- 
sentially Northerners — that is, citizens of a democratic repub- 
lic, and not oligarchists. 

As the Southerners admit that there can be no further war, 
it would be better even for themselves that they should allow 
the sad record of their rising to fade away. Their speeches, 
their newspapers, continue to make use of language which 
nothing could excuse, and which, in the face of the magna- 
nimity of the conquerors, is disgraceful. In a Mobile paper I 
have seen a leader which describes with hideous minuteness 
Lincoln, Lane, John Brown, and Dostie playing whist in hell. 
A Texas cutting which I have is less blasphemous, but not less 
tile : "The English language no longer affords terms in which 
to curse a snivelling, weazen-faced piece of humanity general- 
ly denominated a Yankee. We see some about here some- 
times, but they skulk around, like sheep-killing dogs, and as- 
sociate mostly with niggers. They whine and prate, and talk 



The South. 89 

about the judgment of God, as if God had any thing to do 
with them." The Southerners have not even the wit or grace 
to admit that the men who beat them were good soldiers ; 
" blackguards and braggarts," " cravens and thieves " are com- 
mon names for the men of the Union army. I have in my 
possession an Alabama paper, in which General Sheridan, at 
that time the commander of the military division which includ- 
ed the State, is styled " a short-tailed, slimy tadpole of the 
later spawn, the blathering disgrace of an honest father, an 
everlasting libel on his Irish blood, the synonym of infamy, 
and scorn of aU brave men." While I was in Virginia, one 
of the Richmond papers said, " This thing of ^ loyalty ' will 
not do for the Southern man." 

The very day that I landed in the South, a dinner was 
given at Richmond by the " Grays " — a volunteer corps which 
had fought through the rebellion. After the roll of honor, 
or list of men killed in battle, had been read, there were given 
as toasts, by rebel officers, " Jeff. Davis — the caged eagle ; the 
bars confine his person, but his great spirit soars ;" and " The 
conquered banner, may its resurrection at last be as bright 
and as glorious as tKeirs — the dead." 

It is in the face of such words as these that Mr. Johnson, 
the most unteachable of mortals, asks men who have sacrificed 
their sons to restore the Union, to admit the ex-rebels to a 
considerable share in the government of the nation, even if 
they are not to monopolize it, as they did before the war. 
His conduct seems to need the Western editor's defense: 
" He must be kinder honest-like, he aire sich a tarnation fool- 
ish critter." 

It is clear, from the occurrence of such dinners, the publi- 
cation of such paragraphs and leaders as those of which I have 
spoken, that there is no military tyranny existing in the South. 
The country is indeed administered by military commanders, 
but it is not ruled by troops. Before we can give ear to the 
stories that are afloat in Europe of the " government of ma- 
jor-generals," we must believe that five millions of English- 
men inhabiting a country as large as Europe are crushed down 
by some ten thousand men — about as many as are needed to 
keep order in the single town of Warsaw. The Southerners 
are allowed to rule themselves ; the question now at issue is 



40 Greater Britaik. 

merely whether they shall also rule their former slaves, the 
negroes. 

I hardly felt myself out of the reach of slavery and rebel- 
Uon till, steaming up the Potomac from Acquia Creek by the 
gray dawn, I caught sight of a grand pile towering over a city 
from a magnificent situation on the brow of a long, rolling 
hill. Just at the moment, the sun, invisible as yet to us be- 
low, struck the marble dome and cupola, and threw the bright 
gilding into a golden blaze, till the Greek shape stood out 
upon the blue sky, glowing like a second sun. The city was 
Washington ; the palace with the burnished cupola the Capi- 
tol ; and within two hours I was present at the " hot- weather 
sitting" of the 39th Congress of the United States. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE EMPIRE STATE. 



At the far south-east of New York City, where the Hud- 
son and East River meet to form the inner bay, is an ill-kept 
park that might be made the loveliest garden in th*e world, 
l^owhere do the features that have caused IsTew York to take 
rank as the first port of America stand forth more clearly. 
The soft evening breeze teUs of a climate as good as the world 
can show ; the setting sun floods with light a harbor secure 
and vast, formed by the confluence of noble streams, and girt 
with quays at which huge ships jostle; the rows of 500- 
pounder Rodmans at " The I^^rrows " are tokens of the na- 
tion's strength and wealth ; and the yachts, as well handled as 
our own, racing into port from an ocean regatta, give evidence 
that there are Saxons in the land. At the back is the city, 
teeming with life, humming with trade, muttering with the 
thunder of passage. Opposite in Jersey City, people say, 
" Every ]^ew Yorker has come a good half-hour late into the 
world, and is trying all his life to make it up." The bustle 
is immense. 

All is so un-English, so foreign, that hearing men speaking 
what Czar Nicholas was used to call " the American tongue," 



The Empire State. 41 

I wheel round, crying, " Dear me ! if here are not some En- 
glish folk !" astonished as though I had heard French in Aus- 
tralia, or Italian in Timbuctoo. 

The Englishman who, coming to America, expects to find 
cities that smell of home, soon learns that Baker Street itself, 
or Portland Place, would not look English in the dry air of a 
continent four thousand miles across. "New York, however, 
is still less English than is Boston, Philadelphia, or Chicago 
— ^her people are as little Saxon as her streets. Once South- 
em* with the brand of slavery deeply printed in the foreheads 
of her foremost men, since the defeat of the rebellion New 
York has to the eye been cosmopolitan as any city of the 
Levant. All nationless towns are not alike : Alexandria has 
a Greek or an Italian tinge ; San Francisco an English tone, 
with something of the heartiness of our Ehzabethan times ; 
iJsTew York has a deep Latin shade, and the democracy of the 
Empire State is of the French, not of the American or En- 
glish type. 

At the back here on the city side are tall, gaunt houses, 
painted red, like those of the quay at Dort or of the Boompjes 
at Rotterdam, the former dwellings of the " Knickerbockers " 
of "New Amsterdam, the founders of IsTew York, but now for- 
gotten. There may be a few square yards of painting, red or 
blue, upon the houses in Broadway ; there may be here and 
there a pagoda summer-house overhanging a canal ; once in a 
year you may run across a worthy descendant of the old 
N'etherlandish families ; but in. the main the Hollanders in 
America are as though they had never been ; to find the me- 
morials of lo^Dutch empire, we must search Cape Colony or 
Ceylon. The New York un-English tone is not Batavian. 
Neither the sons of the men who once lived in these houses, 
nor the Grermans whose names are now upon the doors, nor, 
for the matter of that, we English, who claim New York as 
the second of our towns, are the to-day's New Yorkers. 

Here, on the water's edge, is a rickety hall, where Jenny 
Lind sang when first she landed — ^now the spot where strangers 
of another kind are welcomed to America. Every true re- 
publican has in his heart the notion that his country is point- 
ed out by God for a refuge for the distressed of all the na- 
tions. He has sprung himself from men who came to seek a 



42 Greatek Britain. 

sanctuary — from the Quakers, or the Catholics, or the pilgrims 
of the Mayflower. Even though they come to take the bread 
from his mouth, or to destroy his peace, it is his duty, he be- 
lieves, to aid the immigrants. Within the last twenty years 
there have landed at New York alone four million strangers. 
Of these two-thirds were Irish. 

"While the Celtic men are pouring into New York and Bos- 
ton, the New Englanders and New Yorkers, too, are moving. 
They are not dying. Facts are opposed to this portentous 
theory. They are going West. The unrest of the Cel* is 
mainly caused by discontent with his country's present, that 
of the Saxon, by hope for his private future. The Irishman 
flies to New York because it lies away from Ireland ; the En- 
glishman takes it upon his road to California. 

Where one race is dominant, immigrants of another blood 
soon lose their nationality. In New York and Boston the 
Irish continue to be Celts, for these are Irish cities. In Pitts- 
burg, in Chicago, still more in the country districts, a few years 
made the veriest Paddy Enghsh. On the other hand, the Sax- 
ons are disappearing from the Atlantic cities, as the Spaniards 
have gone from Mexico. The Irish here are beating down the 
English, as the English have crushed out the Dutch. The 
Hollander's descendants in New York are English now ; it 
bids fair that the Saxons should be Irish. 

As it is, though the Celtic immigration has lasted only 
twenty years, the results are already clear : if you see a Sax- 
on face upon the Broadway, you may be sure it belongs to a 
traveller, or to some raw English lad bound West, just landed 
from a Plymouth ship. We need not lay mu# stress upon 
the fact that all New Yorkers have black hair and beard; 
men may be swarthy, and yet English. The ancestors of the 
Londoners of to-day, we are told, were yellow-headed royster- 
ers ; yet not one man in fifty that you meet in Fleet Street 
or on Tower Hill is as fair as the average Saxon peasant. 
Doubtless our English eastern counties were peopled in the 
main by low-Dutch and Flemings : the Sussex eyes and hair 
are rarely seen in Suffolk. The Puritans of New England 
are sprung from those of " associated countries," but the vic- 
tors of Marston Moor may have been cousins to those no less 
sturdy Protestants, the Hollanders who defended Leyden. It 



The Empire State. 43 

may be that they were our ancestors, those Dutchmen that we 
English crowded out of !N"ew Amsterdam — the very place 
where we are sharing the fate we dealt. The fiery temper of 
the new people of the American coast-towns, their impatience 
for free government, are better proofs of Celtic blood than are 
the color of their eyes and beard. 

Year by year the towns grow more and more intensely 
Irish. Already of every four births in Boston, one only is 
American. There are 120,000 foreign to 70,000 native vot- 
ers in I^ew York and Brooklyn. Montreal and Richmond are 
fast becoming Celtic; Philadelphia — shades of Penn! — can 
only be saved by the aid of its Bavarians. Saxon Protest- 
antism is departing with the Saxons: the revenues of the 
Empire State are spent upon Catholic asylums ; plots of city 
land are sold at nominal rates for the sites of Catholic cathe- 
drals by the " city s^e^-f athers," as they are called. IsTot even 
in the West does the Latin Church gain ground more rapidly 
than in IsTew York City ; there are 80,000 professing Catho- 
lics in Boston. 

When is this drama, of which the first scene is played in 
Castle Garden, to have its close ? The matter is grave enough 
already. Ten years ago, the third and fourth cities of the 
world, ^N'ew York and Philadelphia, were as English as our 
London : the one is Irish now, the other all but German. 
ISTot that the Quaker city will remain Teutonic : the Germans, 
too, are going out upon the land ; the Irish alone pour in un- 
ceasingly. All great American towns will soon be Celtic, 
while the country continues English : a fierce and easily- 
roused people will throng the cities, while the law-abiding 
Saxons who till the land will cease to rule it. Our relations 
with America are matters of small moment by the side of the 
one great question. Who are the Americans to be ? 

Our kinsmen are by no means blind to the dangers that 
hang over them. The "Know-nothing" movement failed, 
but Protection speaks the same voice in its opposition to com- 
mercial centres. If you ask a Western man why he, whose in- 
terest is clearly in Free Trade, should advocate Protection, he 
fires out, " Free Trade is good for our American pockets, but 
it's death to us Americans. All your Bastiats and Mills won't 
touch the fact that to us Free Trade must mean salt-water 



4:4: Greater Britain. 

despotism, and the ascendency of iN'ew York and Boston. 
"Which is better for the country — one New York, or ten con- 
tented Pittsburgs and ten industrious Lowells ?" 

The danger to our race and to the world from Irish as- 
cendency is perhaps less imminent than that to the republic. 
In January, 1862, the mayor, Fernando Wood, the elect of the 
" Mozart " democracy, deliberately proposed the secession 
from the Union of New York City. Of all the Northern 
States, New York alone was a dead weight upon the loyal 
people during the war of the rebellion. The constituents of 
Wood were the very Fenians whom in our ignorance we call 
" American." It is America that Fenianism invades from Ire- 
land — not England from America. 

It is no unfair attack upon the Irish to represent them as 
somewhat dangerous inhabitants for mighty cities. Of the 
sixty thousand persons arrested yearly in New York, three- 
fourths are alien born : two-thirds of these are Irish. Nowhere 
else in all America are the Celts at present masters of a city 
government — ^nowhere is there such corruption. The purity 
of the government of Melbourne — a city more democratic 
than New York — proves that the fault does not lie in de- 
mocracy : it is the universal opinion of Americans that the 
Irish are alone resiDonsible. 

The State Legislature is falling into the hands of the men 
who control the city council. They tell a story of a traveller 
on the Hudson Kiver Railroad, who, as the train neared Albany 
-^the capital of New York — said to a somewhat gloomy neigh- 
bor, " Going to the State Legislatur' ?" getting for answer, 
" No, sir ! It's not come to that with me yet. Only to the 
State-prison !" 

Americans are never slow to ridicule the denationalization 
of New York. They tell you that during the war the colonel 
of one of the city regiments said, " I've the best blood of eight 
nations in the ranks." " How's that ?" " I've English, Irish, 
Welsh, Scotch, French, Italians, Germans." " Guess that's 
only seven." " SAvedes," suggested some one. " No, no 
Swedes," said the colonel. " Ah ! I have it : I've some Amer- 
icans." Stories such as this the rich New Yorkers are noth- 
ing loth to tell, but they take no steps to check the denation- 
alization they lament. Instead of entering ujDon a reform of 



The Empire State. 45 

their municipal institutions, they affect to despise free govern- 
ment ; instead of giving, as the oldest New England families 
have done, their time to the State schools, they keep entirely 
aloof from school and State alike. Sending their boys to Cam- 
bridge, Berlin, Heidelberg, anywhere rather than to the col- 
leges of their native land, they leave it to learned, pious Bos- 
ton to supply the West with teachers, and to keep up Yale 
and Harvard. Indignant if they are pointed at as "no Amer- 
icans," they seem to separate themselves from every thing 
that is American : they spend summers in England, winters 
in Algeria, springs in Rome, and Coloradans say with a sneer, 
" Good N^ew Yorkers go to Paris when they die." 

Apart from nationality, there is danger to free government 
with the growth of l^ew York City, and in the gigantic for- 
tunes of 'New Yorkers. The income, they tell me, of one of 
my merchant friends is larger than the combined salaries of 
the President, the governors, and the whole of the members of 
the Legislatures of all the forty-five States and Territories. 
As my informant said, " He could keep the governments of 
half a dozen States as easily as I can support my half-dozen 
children." 

There is something, no doubt, of the exaggeration of polit- 
ical jealousy about the accounts of New York vice given in 
ISTew England and down South, in the shape of terrible phi- 
lippics. It is to be hoped that the over-statement is enormous, 
for sober men are to be found even in ISTew York who will 
tell you that this city outdoes Paris in every form of profli- 
gacy as completely as the French capital outherods imperial 
Home. There is here no concealment about the matter ; each 
inhabitant at once admits the truth of accusations directed 
against his neighbor. If the new men, the " petroleum aris- 
tocracy," are second to none in their denunciations of the 
Irish, these in their turn unite with the oldest families in thun- 
dering against " shoddy." 

New York life shows but badly in the summer-time ; it is 
seen at its worst when studied at Saratoga. With ourselves, 
men have hardly ceased to run from business and pleasures 
worse than toil to the comparative quiet of the country house. 
Among ISTew Yorkers there is not even the affectation of a 
search for rest ; the flight is from the drives and restaurants 



46 Geeater Britain. 

of New York to the gambling-halls of Saratoga ; from win- 
ning piles of greenbacks to losing heaps of gold ; from cotton- 
gambling to roulette or faro. Long Branch is still more vul- 
gar in its vice ; it is the Margate, Saratoga the Homburg, of 
America. 

" Shoddy " is blamed beyond what it deserves when the fol- 
lies of New York society are laid in a body at its door. If it 
be true that the New York drawing-rooms are the best guard- 
ed in the world, it is also true that entrance is denied as rig- 
idly to intellect and eminence as to wealth. If exclusiveness 
be needed, affectation can at least do nothing toward sub- 
duing " shoddy." Mere cliquism, disgusting everywhere, is 
ridiculous in a democratic town ; its rules of conduct are as 
out of place as kid gloves in the New Zealand bushj or gold 
scabbards on a battle-field. 

Good meat, and drink, and air, give strength to the men 
and beauty to the women of a moneyed class ; but in America 
these things are the inheritance of every boy and girl, and 
give their owners no advantage in -the world. During the 
rebellion the ablest generals and bravest soldiers of the North 
sprang, not from the merchant famihes, but from the farmer 
folk. Without special merit of some kind, there can be no 
such thing as aristocracy. 

Many American men and women, who have too little no- 
bility of soul to be patriots, and too little understanding to 
see that theirs is already, in many points, the master-country 
of the globe, come to you and bewail the fate which has 
caused them to be born citizens of a republic, and dwellers in 
a country where men call vices by their names. The least 
educated of their countrymen, the only grossly vulgar class 
that America brings forth, they fly to Europe "to escape 
democracy," and pass their lives in Paris, Pau, or Nice, living 
libels on the country they are believed to ref)resent. 

Out of these discordant elements, Cubans, Knickerbockers, 
Germans, Irish, " first families," " petroleum," and " shoddy," 
we are forced to construct' our composite idea — New York. 
The Irish numerically predominate, but we have no experi- 
ence as to what should be the moral features of an Irish city, 
for Dublin has always been in English hands ; possibly that 
which in New York appears to be cosmopolitan is merely 



Cambridge Commencement. 47 

Celtic. However it may be, this much is clear, that the 
humblest township of ISTew England reflects more truly the 
America of the past, the most chaotic village of Nebraska 
portrays more fully the hopes and tendencies of the America 
of the future, than do this huge State and city. 

If the political figure of ISTew York is not encouraging, its 
natural beauty is singularly great. Those who say that 
America has no scenery, forget the Hudson, while they can 
never have explored Lake George, Lake Champlain, and the 
Mohawk. That Poole's exquisite scene from the " Decame- 
ron," " Philomela's Song," could have been realized on earth 
I never dreamt until I saw the singers at a Xew Yorker's 
villa on the Hudson grouped in the deep shades of a glen, 
from which there was an outlook upon the basaltic palisades 
and lake-like Tappan Zee. It was in some such spot that De 
Tocqueville wrote the brightest of his brilliant letters — that 
dated " Sing Sing " — ^for he speaks of himself as lying on a 
hill that overhung the Hudson, watching the white sails gleam- 
ing in the hot sun, and trying in vain to fancy what became 
of the river where it disappeared in the blue " Highlands." 

That l^ew York City itself is full of beauty the view from 
Castle Garden would suffice to show ; and by night it is not 
less lovely than by day. The harbor is illuminated by the 
colored lanterns of a thousand boats, and the steam-whistles 
tell of a life that never sleeps. The paddles of steamers seem 
not only to beat the water, but to stir the languid air, and so 
provoke a breeze, and the lime-lights at the Fulton and Wall 
Street ferries burn so brightly that in the warm glare the eye 
reaches through the still night to the feathery acacias in the 
streets of Brooklyn. The view is as southern as the people : 
we have not yet found America. 



CHAPTER V. 

CAMBRIDGE COMMEI^CEMENT. 



"Old Cambridge ! Long may she flourish!" proposed 
by a professor in the University of Cambridge, in America, 
and drunk standing, Avith three cheers, by the graduates and 
under-graduates of Harvard, is a toast that sets one thinking. 



48 Greater Britain. 

Cambridge in America is not by any means a university 
of to-day. Harvard College, which, being the only " house," 
has engrossed the privileges, funds, and titles of the Univer- 
sity, was founded at Cambridge, Mass., in 1636, only ninety 
years later than the greatest and wealthiest college of our 
Cambridge in Old England. Puritan Harvard was the sister 
rather than the daughter of our own Puritan Emmanuel. 
Harvard himself, and Dunster, the first president of Harvard's 
College, Avere among the earliest of the scholars of Emmanuel. 

A toast from the Cambridge of New to the Cambridge of 
Old England is one from younger to elder sister ; and Dr. 
Wendell Holmes, " The Autocrat," said as much in proposing 
it at the Harvard Alumni Celebration of 1866. 

Like other old institutions. Harvard needs a ten-days' 
revolution: academic" abuses flourish as luxuriantly upon 
American as on English soil, and university difficulties are 
much the same in either country. Here, as at home, the com- 
plaint is that the men come up to the University untaught. 
To all of them their college is forced for. a time to play the 
high-school ; to some she is never any thing more than school. 
At Harvard this is worse than with ourselves : the average 
age of entry, though of late much risen, is still considerably 
under eighteen. 

The college is now aiming at raising gradually the stand- 
ard of entry : when once all are excluded save men, and think- 
ing men, real students, such as those by whom some of the 
new Western universities are attended, then Harvard hopes 
to leave drill-teaching entirely to the schools, and to permit 
the widest freedom in the choice of studies to her students. 

Harvard is not blameless in this matter. Like other uni- 
versities, she is conservative of bad things as well as good ; 
indeed, ten minutes within her walls would suffice to convince 
even an Englishman that Harvard clings to the times before 
the Revolution. 

Her conservatism is shown in many trivial things — in the 
dress of her janitors and porters, in the cut of the grass-plots 
and college gates, in the conduct of the Commencement ora- 
tions in the chapel. For the dainty little dames from Boston 
who came to hear their friends and brothers recite their dis- 
quisitions none but Latin programmes were provided, and the 



Cambridge Commencement. 49 

poor ladies were condemned to find such names as Bush, Mau- 
rice, Benjamin, Humphrey, and Underwood among the gradu- 
ating youths, distorted into Bvsh, Mavritivs, Beniamin, Hvm- 
phredvs, Vnderwood. 

This conservatism of the N'ew England universities had 
just received a sharp attack. In the Commencement oration, 
Dr. Hedges, one of the leaders of the Unitarian Church, had 
strongly pressed the necessity for a complete freedom of 
study after entry, a liberty to take up what line the student 
would, to be examined and to graduate in what he chose. 
He had instanced the success of Michigan University con- 
sequent upon the adoption of this plan; he had pointed 
to the fact that of all the universities in America, Michigan 
alone drew her students from every State. President Hill 
and Ex-president Walker had indorsed his views. 

There is a special fitness in the reformers coming forward 
at this time. This year is the commencement of a new era at 
Harvard, for at the request of the college staff, the connection 
of the University with the commonwealth of Massachusetts 
has just been dissolved, and the members of the Board of 
Overseers are in future to be elected by the University, in- 
stead, of nominated by the State. This being so, the question 
had been raised as to whether the governor would come in 
state to Commencement, but he yielded to the wishes of the 
graduates, and came with the traditional pomp, attended by a 
staff in uniform, and escorted by a troop of Volunteer Lan- 
cers, whose scarlet coats and polished hats recalled the times 
before the Kevolution. 

While the ceremony was still in progress, I had been in- 
troduced to several of the foremost rowing-men among the 
younger graduates of Harvard, and at its conclusion I accom- 
panied them to their river. They were in strict training for 
their University race with Yale, which was to come off in a 
week; and as Cambridge had been beaten twice running, and 
this year had a better crew, they were wishful for criticisms 
on their style. Such an opinion as a stranger could offer was 
soon given ; they were dashing, fast, long in their stroke ; 
strong, considering their light weights, but terribly overwork- 
ed. They have taken for a rule the old English notions as 
to training which have long since disappeared at home, and, 

C 



50 Geeater Beitain. 

looked upon as fanatics by their friends and tutors, they have 
all the fanatic's excess of zeal. 

Rowing and other athletics, with the exceptions of skating 
and base ball, are both neglected and despised in America. 
When the smallest sign of a reaction appears in the New 
Eno-land colleges, there comes at once a cry from Boston that 
brains are being postponed to brawn. If New Englanders 
would look about them, they would see that their climate has 
of itself developed brains at the expense of brawn, and that, 
if national degeneracy is to be long prevented, brawn must in 
some way be fostered. The high shoulder, head-voice, and 
pallor of the Boston men are not incomj)atible with the pos- 
session of the most powerful brain, the keenest wit ; but it is 
not probable that energy and talent will be continued in fu- 
ture generations sprung from the worn-out men and women 
of to-day. 

The prospect at present is not bright ; year by year Ameri- 
cans grow thinner, lighter, and shorter-lived. Elian's Ameri- 
cans, we may remember, though they were greatly superior to 
the Greeks in stature, were inferior to them in length of life. 
The women show even greater signs of weakness than the 
men, and the high, undulatmg tones which are affectation in 
the French are natural to the ladies of America ; little can be 
expected of women whose only exercise is excessive dancing 
in overheated rooms. 

The American summer, often tropical in its heat, has much 
to answer for, but it is the winter Avhich makes the saddest 
havoc among the yoimger people, and the boys and girls at 
school. Cooped up all day in the close air of the heated 
school-house, the poor children are at night made to run 
straight back to the furnace-dried atmosphere of home. The 
thermometer is commonly raised in-doors to 80 or 90 degrees 
Fahr. The child is not only baked into paleness and sweated 
bit by bit to its death, but fed meantime, out of mistaken 
kindness, upon the most indigestible of dainties — pastry, hot 
dough-nuts, and sweetmeats taking the place of bread, and 
milk, and meat — and is not allowed to take the slightest 
exercise, except its daily run to school-house. Who can won- 
der that spinal diseases should prevail? 

One reason w^hy Americans are pale and aguish is that, as 



Cambridge Commencement. 51 

a people, they are hewers of primeval forest and tillers of vir- 
gin soil. These are the unhealthiest employments in the 
world; the sun darts down upon the hitherto unreached 
mould, and sets free malarious gases, against which the new 
settlers have no antidotes. 

The rowing-men of Harvard tell me that their clubs are 
still looked on somewhat coldly by the majority of the pro- 
fessors, who obstinalely refuse to see that improved physical 
type is not an end, but a means, toward improvement of the 
mental faculties, if not in the present, at least in the next gen- 
eration. As for the moral training in the virtues of obedience 
and command, for which a boat's crew is the best of schools, 
that is not yet understood at Harvard, where rowing is con- 
fined to the half-dozen men who are to represent the college 
in the annual race, and the three or four more who are be- 
ing trained to succeed them in the crew. Rowing in Ameri- 
ca is what it was till ten years since at old Cambridge, and is 
still at Oxford — not an exercise for the majority of the stu- 
dents, but a pursuit for a small number. Physical culture is, 
however, said to be making some small progress in the older 
States, and I myself saw signs of the tendency in Philadelphia. 
The war has done some good in this respect, and so has the 
influx of Canadians to Chicago. Cricket is still almost an un- 
known thing, except in some few cities. When I was coming 
in to Baltimore by train, we passed a meadow in which a 
match was being played. A Southerner to whom I was talk- 
ing at the time, looked at the players, and said with surprise : 
" Reckon they've got a wounded man ther', front o' them 
sticks, sah." I found that he meant the batsman, who was 
wearing pads. 

One of the most brilliant of Harvard's thinkers has taken 
to carpentering as a relief to his mental toil ; her most famed 
professor is often to be found working in his garden or his 
farm ; but such change of work for work is possible only to 
certain men. The generality of Americans need not only 
exercise, but relaxation ; still, with less physical, they possess 
greater mental vitality than ourselves. 

On the day that foUows Commencement — the chief cere- 
mony of the academic year — is held once in three summers 
the " Alumni Celebration," or meeting of the past graduates 



52 Greater Britain. 

of Harvard — a touching gathering at all times, but peculiarly 
so in these times that follow on the losses of the war. 

The American college informal organizations rest upon the 
unit of the "class." The "class" is what at Cambridge is 
called " men of the same year " — men who enter together and 
graduate together at the end of the regular course. Each 
class of a large New England college, such as Harvard, will 
often possess an association of its own ; its members will dine 
together once in five years, or ten — men returning from Eu- 
rope and from the Far West to be present at the gathering. 

Harvard is strong in the affections of the New England 
2)eople — her faults are theirs ; they love her for them, and 
keep her advantages to themselves, for in the whole list of 
graduates for this year I could find only two Irish names. 

Here, at the Alumni Celebration, a procession was mar- 
shalled in the library in which the order was by classes ; the 
oldest class of which there were living members being the 
first. " Class of 1797 !" and two old white-haired gentlemen 
tottered from the crowd, and started on their march down the 
central aisle, and out bareheaded into the blaze of one of the 
hottest days that America had ever known. " Class of 1800 !" 
missing two years, in which all the graduates were dead; 
and out came one, the sole survivor. Then came " 1803," and 
so on, to the stalwart company of the present year. When 
the classes of 1859 and 1860, and of the war-years were call- 
ed, those who marched out showed many an empty sleeve. 

The present triennial celebration is noteworthy not only for 
the efforts of the University reformers, but also for the foun- 
dation of the Memorial Hall, dedicated as a monument to 
those sons of Harvard who fell while serving their country in 
the suppression of the late rebellion. The purity of their 
patriotism hardly needed illustration by the fire of young 
Everett, the graceful speech of Dr. Holmes. Even the splen- 
did oratory of Governor Bullock could do little more than 
force us to read for ourselves the Koll of Honor, and see how 
many of Harvard's most distinguished younger men died for 
their country as privates of Massachusetts Volunteers. 

There was a time, as England knows, when the thinking 
men of Boston, and the Cambridge professors, Emerson, Rus- 
sell Lowell, Asa Gray, and a dozen more of almost equal fame. 



Cambridge Commencement. 53 

morally seceded from their country's councils, and were fol- 
lowed in their secession by the younger men. " The best 
men in America stand aloof from politics," it was said. 

The country from which these men seceded was not the 
America of to-day; it was the union which South Carolina 
ruled. From it the Cambridge professors "came out," not 
because they feared to vex their nerves with the shock of pub- 
lic argument and action, but because the course of the slave- 
holders was not their course. Hating the wrongs they saw 
but could not remedy, they separated themselves from the 
wrong-doers — another matter, this, from the "hating hatred" 
of our culture class in England. 

In 1863 and 1864 there came the reckoning. When Ameri- 
ca was first brought to see the things that had been done in 
her name, and at her cost, and, rising in her hitherto unknown 
strength, struck the noblest blow for freedom that the world 
has seen, the men who had been urging on the movement from 
without at once re-entered the national ranks, and marched to 
victory. Of the men who sat beneath Longfellow, and Agas- 
siz, and Emerson, whole battalions went forth to war. From 
Oberlin almost every male student and professor marched, and 
the university teaching was left in the women's hands. Out 
of 8000 school teachers in Pennsylvania, of whom 300 alone 
were draughted, 3000 volunteered for the war. Everywhere 
the teachers and their students were foremost among the vol- 
unteers, and from that time forward America and her think--- 
ers were at one. 

The fierce passions of this day of wakening have not been 
suffered to disturb the quiet of the academic town. Our En- 
glish universities have not about them the classic repose, the 
air of study, that belong to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Those 
who have seen the lanes of Leyden, and compared them with 
the noisy Oxford High Street, will understand what I mean 
when I say that our Cambridge comes nearest to her daugh- 
ter-town; but even the English Cambridge has a bustling 
street or two, and a weekly market-day, while Cambridge 
in New England is one great academic grove, buried in the 
philosophic calm which our university towns can never ri- 
val so long as men resort to them for other purposes than 
work. 



54 Geeater Britain. 

It is not only in the Harvard precincts that the oldness of 
New England is to be remarked. Although her people are 
everywhere in the vanguard of all progress, their country has 
a look of gable-ends and steeple-hats, while their law^s seem 
fresh from the hands of Alfred. In all England there is no 
city which has suburbs so gray and venerable as are the elm- 
shaded towns round Boston: Dorchester, Chelsea, Nahant, 
and Salem, each seems more ancient than its fellow ; the peo- 
ple speak the English of EUzabeth, and joke about us, " 

speaks good English for an Englishman." 

In the country districts, the winsome villages that nestle in 
the dells seem to have been there for ten centuries at least ; 
and it gives one a shock to light on such a spot as Bloody 
Brook, and to be told that only one hundred and ninety years 
ago Captain Lathrop w^as slain there by Red Indians, with 
eighty youths, " the flower of Essex County," as the Puritan 
history says. 

The warnings of Dr. Hedges, in reference to the strides of 
Michigan, have taken the New Englanders by surprise. Se- 
cure, as they believed, in their intellectual supremacy, they for- 
got that in a federal union the moral and physical primacy 
will generally both reside in the same State. The common- 
wealth of Massachusetts, at one time the foremost upholder 
of the doctrine of State Rights, will soon be seen once more 
acting as its champion — this time on behalf of herself and her 
five sister States. 

Were the six New England common-wealths grouped to- 
gether into a single State, it would still have only three-fourths 
of the population of New York, and about an equal number of ' 
inhabitants with Pennsylvania. The State of Rhode Island is 
one-fourth the size of many a single California county. Such 
facts as these will not be long lost sight of in the West ; and 
when a difference of interests springs up, Ohio will not suffer 
her voice in the Senate to continue to be neutralized by that of 
Connecticut or Rhode Island. Even if the Senate be allowed 
to remain untouched, it is certain that the redistribution of 
seats consequent upon the census of 18*70 will completely 
transfer political power to the central States. That New En- 
gland will by this change inevitably lose her hold upon the des- 
tinies of the whole Union is not so clear. The influence for 



Cambkidge Commencement. 55 

good of New England upon the West has been chiefly semi- 
nal, but not for that the less enormous. Go into a State such 
as Michigan, where half the people are immigrants — where, 
of the remaining moiety, the greater part are born Western- 
ers, and apparently in no way of New England — and you will 
find that the inhabitants are for the most part earnest. God- 
fearing men, with a New England tone of profound manliness 
and conviction running through every thing they say and do. 
The colleges in which they have been reared are directed, you 
will find, by New England professors, men reared in the clas- 
sic schools of Harvard, Yale, or Amherst ; the ministers under 
whom they sit are, for the most part, Boston men ; the books 
they read are of New England, or old English of the class 
from which the writers of the Puritan States themselves have 
drawn their inspiration. To New England is chiefly due, in 
short, the making of America a godly nation. 

It is something in this age to come across a people who be- 
lieve strongly in any thing, and consistently act upon their 
beliefs : the New Englanders are such a race. Thoroughly 
God-fearing States are not so common that we can afford to 
despise them when found, and nowhere does religion enter 
more into daily life than in Vermont or Massachusetts. 

The States of the Union owe so huge a debt of gratitude 
to New England, that on this score alone they may refrain 
from touching her with sacrilegious hands. Not to name her 
previous sacrifices, the single little State of* Massachusetts — 
one-fourth the size of Scotland, and but half as populous as 
Paris — sent during the rebellion a hundred and fifty regiments 
to the field. 

It was to Boston that Lincoln telegraphed when, in 1861, at 
a minute's notice, he needed men for the defense of Wash- 
ington. So entirely were Southerners of the opinion that the 
New Englanders were the true supporters of the old flag, that 
" Yankee " became a general term for loyalists of any State. 
America can never forget the steady heroism of New England 
during the great struggle for national existence. 

The unity that has been the chief cause of the strength of 
the New England influence is in some measure sprung from 
the fact that these six States are completely shut off from 
all America by the single State of New York, alien from them 



56 Greater Britain. 

in political and moral life. Every Yankee feels his country 
bounded by the British, the Irish, and the sea. 

In addition to the homogeneousness of isolation, the New 
Englanders, like the Northern Scotch, have the advantages of 
a bad climate and a miserable soil. These have been the true 
agents in the development of the energy, the skill, and forti- 
tude of the Yankee people. In the war, for instance, it was 
plain that the children of the poor and ragged North-eastern 
States were not the men to be beaten by the lotus-eaters of 
Louisiana when they were doing battle for what they believed 
to be a religious cause. 

One effect of the poverty of soil with which New England 
is afflicted has been that her sons have wandered from end to 
end of the known world, engaged in every trade, and succeed- 
ing in all. Sometimes there is in their migrations a religious 
side. Mormonism, although it now draws its forces from 
Great Britain, was founded in New England. At Brindisi, on 
my way home, I met three Yankees returning from a Maine 
colony lately founded at Jaffa, in exp,ectation of the fulfilment 
of prophecy, and destruction of the Mohammedan rule. For 
the moment they are* intriguing for a firman from the very 
Government upon the coming fall of which all their expecta- 
tions have been based, and these fierce fanatics are making 
money by managing a hotel. One of them told me that the 
Jaffa colony is a " religio-commercial speculation." 

New England Yankees are not always so filled with the 
Puritan spirit as to reject unlawful means of money-making. 
Even the Massachusetts common schools and prim Connecti- 
cut meeting-houses turn out their black sheep into the world. 
At Centre Harbor, in New Hampshire, I met with an example 
of the " Yankee spawn " in a Maine man — a shrewd, sailor- 
looking fellow. He was sitting next me at the table-d'hote, 
and asked me to take a glass of his champagne. I declined, 
but chatted, and let out that I was a Britisher. 

"I was subject to your Government once for sixteen 
months," my neighbor said. 

"Really! Where?" 

" Sierra Leone. I was a prisoner there. And very lucky 
too." 

" Why so ?" I asked. 



Canada. 57 

" Because, if the American Government had caught me, 
they would have hanged me for a pirate. But I wasn't a pi- 
rate.'''' 

With overgreat energy I struck in, " Of course not." 

My N"eighbok. "JVo/ I was a slaver H'' 

Idhng among the hills of ISTew Hampshire and the lakes of 
Maine, it is impossible for a stranger, starting free from preju- 
dice, not to end by loving the pious people of IsTew England, 
for he will see that there could be no severer blow to the cause 
of freedom throughout the world than the loss by them of an 
influence upon American life and thought which has been one 
of unmixed good. Still, New England is not America. 



CHAPTER VI. 

CAK-ADA. 

Theee is not in the world a nobler outlook than that from 
off the terrace at Quebec, You stand upon a rock overhang- 
ing city and river^ and look down upon the guard-ship's masts. 
Acre upon acre of timber comes floating down the stream 
above the city, the Canadian songs just reaching you upon 
the heights ; and beneath you are fleets of great ships, English, 
German, French, and Dutch, embarking the timber from the 
floating-docks. The stars and stripes are nowhere to be seen. 
Such are the distances in North America, that here, farther 
from the sea than is any city in Europe west of Moscow, we 
have a sea-port town, with gun-boat and three-decker, morning 
and evening guns, and bars of " God save the Queen," to mark 
the opening and closing of the port. 

The St. Lawrence runs in a chasm in a flat table -land, 
through which some earlier Niagara seems to have cut for it 
a way. Some of the tributaries are in sight, all falling from a 
cliff into the deep still river. In the distance, seaward, a sil- 
ver ribbon on the rock represents the grand Falls of Montmo- 
renci. Long villages of white tiny cots straggle along the 
roads that radiate from the city ; the great black cross of the 
French parish church showing reverently from all. 

C2 



58 Greater Britain. 

On the north the eye reaches to the rugged outlines of the 
Laurentian range, composed of the oldest mountains in the 
world, at the foot of which is Lake St. Charles, full of fiord- 
like northern beauty, where at a later time I learned to paddle 
the Indian canoe of birch-bark. 

Leaving the citadel, we are at once in the European IVIiddle 
Ages. Gates and posterns, cranky steps that led up to lofty 
gabled houses, with sharp French roofs of burnished tin, like 
those of Liege; processions of the Host; altars decked with 
flowers ; statues of the Virgin, sabots, blouses ; and the scarlet 
of the British linesmen — all these are seen in narrow streets 
and markets, that are graced with many a Cotentin lace cap, 
and all within forty miles of the down-east Yankee State of 
Maine. It is not far from Kew England to Old France. 

Quebec Lower Town is very like St. Peter Port in Guern- 
sey. Norman-French inhabitants, guarded by British troops, 
step-built streets, thronged fruit-mai'ket, and citadel upon a 
rock, frowning down upon the quays, are alike in each. A 
slight knowledge of the Uj)per I^ormandy patois is not with- 
out its use ; it procured me an offer of a pinch of snuff from 
an old habitante on board one of the river-boats. Her gesture 
was worthy of the ancien regime. 

There has been no dying-out of the race among the French 
Canadians. They number twenty times the thousands that 
they did a hundred years ago. The American soil has left 
their physical type, religion, language, laws, and habits abso- 
lutely untouched. They herd together in their rambling villa- 
ges, dance to the fiddle after mass on Sundays as gayly as once 
did their Norman sires, and keep up the fleur-de-lis and the 
memory of Montcalm. More French than the French are the 
Lower Canadian habitants. 

Not only here, but everywhere, a French " dependency "is 
France transported ; not a double of the France to-day, but a 
mummy of the France of the time of the " colony's " f ounda- 
tiouc In Saigon, you find Imperial France; here, the France 
of Louis Quatorze. The Englishman founds everywhere a 
New England — new in thought as in soil ; the Frenchman 
carries with him to California, to Japan, an undying recollec- 
tion of the Palais Royal. In San Francisco there lives a great 
French capitalist, who, since 1849, has been the originator of 



Canada. ^ 59 

every successful Californian speculation. He can not speak a 
word of English, and his greatest pleasure, in a country of 
fruits and wine, is to bid his old French servant assure him, 
upon honor, that his whole dessert, from his claret to his olives, 
has been brought for him from France. There is much in the 
colonizing instinct of our race, but something, perhaps, in the 
consideration that the English are hardly happy enough at 
home to be always looking back to what they have left in the 
Old Country. 

There is about this Old Pi ance something of Dutch sleepi- 
ness and content. There is, indeed, some bustle in the market- 
place, where the grand old dames in snowy caps sit selling 
plums and pears ; there is much singing made over the lading 
of the timber-ships ; there are rafts in hundreds gliding down 
the river ; old French carts in dozens, creaking and wheezing 
on their lumbering way to town, with much cracking of whips 
and clappering of wooden shoes. All these things there are, 
but then there are these and more in Dol, and Quimper, and 
Morlaix — in all those towns which in Europe come nearest to 
Old France. There is quiet bustle, subdued trade, prosperity 
deep, not noisy ; but the life is sleepy ; the rafts float, and are 
not tugged nor rowed ; the old Norman horses seem to draw 
the still older carts without an effort, and the very boys wear 
noisy shoes against their will, and make a clatter simply be- 
cause they can not help it. 

In such a scene it is impossible to forget that British 
troops are here employed as guardians of the only true French 
colony in the w^orld against the inroads of the English race. 
" N'os institutions, notre langue, nos lois," is the motto of the 
hahita7its. Their newspapers are filled with Church celebra- 
tions, village f ^tes, speeches of " M. le Cure " at the harvest 
home, announcements by the " scherif," speech of M. Cartier 
at the consecration of Monseigneur Laroque, blessings of bells, 
of ships ; but of life, nothing — of mention of what is passing 
in America, not a word. One corner is given to the world 
outside America : " Emprunt Pontifical, Emission Americaine, 
quatre millions de piastres," heads a solid column of holy 
finance. The pulse-beat of the Continent finds no echo here. 

It is not only in political affairs that there is a want of en- 
ergy in French or Lower Canada: in journeying from Port- 



60 ^ Greater Britain. 

land to Quebec, the moment the frontier was passed we seem- 
ed to have come from a land of life to one of death. No more 
bustling villages, no more keen-eyed farmers : a fog of unen- 
terprise hung over the land ; roads were wanting, houses rude, 
swamps undrained, fields unweeded, plains untilled. 

If the eastern townships and country round Quebec are a 
wilderness, they are not a desert. The country on the Sague- 
nay is both. At Quebec in summer it is hot — ^musquitoes are 
not unknown : even at Tadousac, where the Saguenay flows 
into the St. Lawrence, there is sunhght as strong as that of 
Paris. Once in the northern river, all is cold, gloomy, arctic — 
no house, no boat, no sign of man's existence, no beasts, no 
birds, although the St. Lawrence swarms with duck and loons. 
The river is a straight, cold, black fiord, waUed in by tremen- 
dous cliffs, which go sheer down into depths to which their 
height above water is as nothing ; two walls of rock, and a 
path of ice-cold, inky water. Fish there are, seal and salmon 
— that is all. The " whales and porpoises," which are adver- 
tised by the Tadousac folk as certain to " disport themselves 
daily in fi'ont of the hotel," are never to be seen in this earth- 
crack of the Saguenay. 

The cold for summer was intense ; nowhere in the world 
does the limit of ever-frozen ground come so far south as in 
the longitude of the Saguenay. At night we had a wonderful 
display of northern lights. A white column, towering to the 
mid-skies, rose, died away, and was succeeded by broad white 
clouds, stretching from east to west, and sending streamers 
northward. Suddenly there shot up three fresh silvery col- 
umns in the north, north-west, and north-east, on which all the 
colors of the rainbow danced and played. After moonrise, the 
whole seemed gradually to fade away. 

At Ha-ha Bay, the head of navigation, I found a fur-buy- 
ing station of the Hudson's Bay Company ; but that associa- 
tion has enough to answer for without being charged with the 
desolation of the Saguenay. The company has not here, as 
upon the Red River, sacrificed colonists to minks and silver- 
foxes. There is something more blighting than a monopoly 
that oppresses Lower Canada. As I returned to Quebec, the 
boat that I was aboard touched at St. Paschal, now called Ri- 
viere du Loup, the St. Lawrence terminus of the Grand Trunk 



Canada, 61 

line ; we found there immense wharves, and plenty of bells and 
crosses, but not a single ship, great or small. Even in Vir- 
ginia I had seen nothing more disheartening. 

^N'orth of the St. Lawrence religion is made to play as active 
a part in politics as in the landscape. Lower Canada, as we 
have seen, is French, and Catholic ; Upper Canada is Scotch, 
and Presbyterian, though the Episcopalians are strong in 
wealth, and the Irish Catholics in numbers. 

Had the Catholics been united, they might, since the fusion 
of the two Canadas, have governed the whole country : as it 
is, the Irish and French neither worship nor vote together, 
and of late the Scotch have had nearly their own way. 

Finding themselves steadily losing ground, the French 
threw in their lot with the scheme for the confederation of 
the provinces, and their clergy took up the cause with a zeal 
which they justified to their flocks by pointing out that the 
alternative was annexation to America, and possible confisca- 
tion of the Church lands. 

Confederation of the provinces means separation of the Can- 
adas, which regain each its Parliament ; and the French Cath- 
olics begin to hope that the Irish of Upper Canada, now that 
they are less completely overshaded by the more numerous 
French, will again act with their co-religionists : the Catholic 
vote in the new confederation will be nearly half the whole. 
In Toronto, however, the Fenians are strong, and even in 
Montreal their presence is not unknown: it is a question 
whether the whole of the Canadian Irish are not disaffected. 
The Irish of the chief city have their Irish priests, their Ca- 
thedral of St. Patrick, while the French have theirs upon the 
Place d'Armes. The want of union may save the dominion 
from the establishment of Catholicism as a State Church. 

The confederation of our provinces was necessary, if Brit- 
ish North America was to have a chance for life ; but it can 
not be said to be accompHshed while British Columbia and 
the Red River tract are not included. To give Canada an 
outlet on one side is something, but communication with the 
Atlantic is a small matter by the side of communication at 
once with Atlantic and Pacific through British territory. We 
shall soon have railways from Halifax to Lake Suj^erior, and 
thence to the Pacific is but 1600 miles. It is true that the line 



62 GrREATER BRITAIN. 

is far north, and exposed to heavy snows and bitter cold ; but, 
on the other hand, it is well supplied with wood, and, if it 
possesses no such fertile tracts as that of Kansas and Colo- 
rado, it at least escaj)es the frightful wilds of Bitter Creek and 
Mirage Plains. 

We are now even left in doubt how long we shall continue 
to possess so much as a route across the continent on paper. 
Since the cession of Russian America to the United States, a 
map of North America has been published in which the name 
of the great- republic sprawls across the continent from Behr- 
ing's Straits to Mexico, with the " E " in " United " ominously- 
near Vancouver's Island, and the " T " actually planted upon 
British territory. If we take up the British Columbian, we 
find the citizens of tl^e main-land portion of the provinces 
proposing to sell the island for twen.ty million dollars to the 
States. 

Settled chiefly by Americans from Oregon and California, 
and situated, for purposes o£ re- enforcement, immigration, 
and supply, at a distance of not less- than twenty thousand 
miles from home, the British Pacific colonies can hardly be 
considered strong in their allegiance to the Crown : we have 
here the reductio ad ahsurdum, of home government. 

Our hindering trade by tolerating the presence of two sets 
of custom-houses and two sets of coins between Halifax and 
Lake Superior, was less absurd than our altogether prevent- 
ing its existence now. Under a so-called confederation of our 
American possessions, we have left a country the size of civ- 
ilized Europe, and nearly as large as the United States — lying, 
too, upon the track of commerce and high-road to China — to 
be despotically governed by a company of traders in skins 
and peltries, and to remain as long as it so pleases them in 
the dead stillness and desertion needed to insure the presence 
of fur-bearing beasts. 

" Red River " should be a second Minnesota, Halifax a 
second Liverpool, Esquimault a second San Francisco ; but 
double government has done its work, and the outposts of 
the line of trade are already in American, not British hands. 
The gold mines of Nova Scotia, the coal mines and forests of 
British Columbia, are owned in New England and New York, 
and the Californians are expecting the proclamation of an 



Canada. 63 

American territorial government in the capital of Vancouv- 
er's Island. 

As Montana becomes peopled up, we shall hear of the "col- 
onization " of Red River by citizens of the United States, such 
as preceded the hoisting of the " lone star " in Texas, and the 
" bear flag " in California, by Fremont ; and resistance by the 
Hudson's Bay Company will neither be possible, nor, in the 
interests of civilization, desirable. 

Even supposing a great popular awakening upon Colonial 
questions, and the destruction of the Hudson's Bay monop- 
oly, we never could make the Canadian dominion strong. 
With the addition of Columbia and Red River, British 
America would hardly be as powerful or populous as the 
two north-western States of Ohio and Illinois, or the single 
State of New York — one out of forty-five. " Help us for 
ten years, and then we'll help ourselves," the Canadians say ; 
"help us to become ten millions, and then we will stand, 
alone ;" but this becoming ten millions is not such an easy 
thing. 

The ideas of most of us as to the size of the British terri- 
tories are derived from maps of North America, made upon 
Mercator's projection, which are grossly out in high latitudes, 
though correct at the equator. The Canadas are made to ap- 
pear at least twice their proper size, and such gigantic "pro- 
portions are given to the northern parts of the Hudson terri- 
tory that we are tempted to believe that in a country so vast 
there must be some little value. The true size is no more 
shown upon the map than is the nine-months' winter. 

To Upper Canada, which is no bad country, it is not for 
lack of asking that population fails to come. Admirably-exe- 
cuted gazettes give the fullest information about the British 
possessions in the most glowing of terms ; offices and agencies 
are established in Liverpool, London, Cork, Londonderry, and 
a dozen other cities ; Government immigration agents and in- 
formation-offices are to be found in every town in Canada ; 
the Government emigrant is looked after in health, comfort, 
and religion ; directions of the fullest kind are given him in 
the matters of money, clothes, tools, luggage ; Canada, he is 
told by the Government papers, possesses perfect religious, 
political, and social freedom; British subjects step at once 



64 Greater Britain. 

into the possession of political rights ; the winter is but brac- 
ing, the climate the healthiest in the world. Millions of acres 
of surveyed Crown lands are continually in the market. To 
one who knows what the northern forests are there is perhaps 
something of satire in the statement that " there is generally 
on Crown lands an unlimited supply of the best fuel." What 
of that, however ? The intending emigrant knows nothing of 
the struggle w^ith the woods, and fuel is fuel in Old England. 
The mining of the precious metals, the fisheries, j)etr oleum, 
all are open to the settler — let him but come. Reading these 
documents, we can only rub our eyes, and wonder how it is 
that human selfishness allows the Canadian officials to disclose 
the wonders of their El Dorado to the outer world, and invite 
all men to share blessings which we should have expected 
them to keep as a close preserve for themselves and their 
nearest and dearest friends. Taxation in the States, the im- 
migrants are told, is five and a half times what it is in Cana- 
ada, two and a half times the English rate. Laborers by 
the thousand, merchants and farmers by the score, are said to 
be flocking into Canada to avoid the taxation of the Radi- 
cals. The average duration of life in Canada is 37 per cent, 
higher than in the States. Yet, in the face of all these facts, 
only twenty or two-and-twenty thousand immigrants come to 
Canada for three hundred thousand that flock annually to the 
States, and of the former many thousands do but pass through 
on their way to the Great West. Of the twenty thousand 
who land at Quebec in each year, but four and a half thou- 
sand remain a year in Canada ; and there are a quarter of a 
million of persons born in British America now naturalized in 
the United States. 

The passage of the immigrants to the Western States is 
not for want of warning. The Canadian Government adver- 
tise every Coloradan duel, every lynching in Montana, every 
Oi^position speech in Kansas, by way of teaching the immi- 
grants to respect the country of which they are about to be- 
come free citizens. 

It is an unfortunate fact that these strange statements are 
not harmless — not harmless to Canada, I mean. The Pro- 
vincial Government, by these publications, seems to confess 
to the world that Canada can live only by running do^vn the 



Canada. 65 

great republic. Canadian sympathy for the rebellion tends to 
make us think that the Northern statesmen must not only 
share in our Old-world confusion of the notions of right and 
wrong, but must be sadly short-sighted into the bargain. It 
is only by their position that they are blinded, for few coun- 
tries have abler men than Sir James Macdonald, or sounder 
statesmen than Cartier or Gait ; but, like men standing on the 
edge of a cliff, Canadian statesmen are always wanting to 
jump off. Had Great Britain left them to their own devices, 
we should have had war with America in the spring of 1866. 

The position of Canada is in many ways anomalous: of 
the two chief sections of our race — ^that in Britain and that 
in America — the latter is again split in twain, and one division 
governed from across the Atlantic. For such- government 
there is no pretext, except the wishes of the governed, who 
gain by the connection men for their defense, and the oppor- 
tunity of gratifying their spite for their neighbors at our ex- 
pense. Those who ask why a connection so one-sided, so op- 
posed to the best interests of our race, should be suffered to 
continue, are answered, now that the argument of " prestige " 
is given up, that the Canadians are loyal, and that they hate 
the Americans, to whom, were it not for us, they must inevi- 
tably fall. That the Canadians hate the Americans can be no 
reason why we should spend blood and treasure in protecting 
them against the consequences of their hate. The world 
should have passed the time when local dislikes can be suffer- 
ed to affect our policy toward the other sections of our race ; 
but even were it otherwise, it is hard to see how twelve thou- 
sand British troops, or a royal standard hoisted at Ottawa, can 
protect a frontier of two thousand miles in length from a na- 
tion of five-and-thirty millions. Canada, perhaps, can defend 
herself, but we most certainly can not defend her : we pro- 
voke much more than we assist. 

As for Canadian "loyalty," it appears to consist merely of 
hatred toward America; for while we were fighting China 
and conquering the rulers of Japan, that we might spread free 
trade, our loyal colonists of Canada set upon our goods pro- 
tective duties of 20 per cent, which they have now in some 
degree removed, only that they may get into their hands the 
smuggling trade carried on in breach of the laws of our ally, 



6Q Greatek Britain. 

their neighbor. We might, at least, fairly insist that the con- 
nection should cease, unless Canada will entirely remove her 
duties. 

At bottom it would seem as though no one gained by the 
retention of our hold on Canada. Were she independent, her 
borders would never again be wasted by Fenian hordes, and 
she would escape the terrible danger of being the battle-field 
in which European quarrels are fought out. Canada once re- 
publican, the Monroe doctrine would be satisfied, and its most 
violent partisans would cease to advocate the adoption of 
other than moral means to merge her territories in the Union. 
An independent Canada would not long delay the railway 
across the continent to Puget Sound, which a British bureau 
calls impossible. England would be relieved from the fear of 
a certain defeat by America in the event of war — a fear al- 
ways harmful, even when war seems most unlikely ; — relieved, 
too, from the cost of such panics as those of 1861 and 1866. 

Did Canada stand alone, no offense that she could give 
America would be likely to unite all, sections of that country 
in an attempt to conquer her ; while, on the other hand, such 
an attempt would be resisted to the death by an armed and 
brave people four millions strong. As it is, any offense to- 
ward America committed by our agents, at any place or time, 
or arising out of the continual changes of policy and of min- 
istry in Great Britain, united to the standing offense of main- 
taining the monarchical principle in North America, will bring 
upon unhappy Canada the whole American nation, indignant 
in some cause, just, or seeming just, and to be met by a peo- 
ple deceived into putting their trust in a few regiments of 
British troops, sufficient at the most to hold Quebec, and to 
be backed by re-enforcements which could never come in time, 
did public opinion in Great Britain so much as permit their 
sailing. 

On the other hand, in all history there is nothing stranger 
than the narrowness of mind that has led us to see in Canada 
a piece of England, and in America a hostile country. There 
are more sons of British subjects in America than in Canada, 
by far ; and the American looks upon the Old Country with 
a pride that can not be shared by a man who looks to her to 
pay his soldiers. 



Canada. 67 

The independence of Canada would put an immediate end 
to much of the American jealousy of Great Britain — a consid- 
eration which of itself should outweigh any claim to protec- 
tion which the Canadians can have on us. The position which 
we have to set before us in our external dealings is, that Ave 
are no more fellow-countrymen of the Canadians than of the 
Americans of the IsTorth or West. 

The capital of the new dominion is to be Ottawa, known 
as " Hole in the Woods " among the friends of Toronto and 
Montreal, and once called Bytown. It consists of the huge 
Parliament-house, the Government printing-office, some house- 
less wildernesses meant for streets, and the hotel where the 
members of the Legislature " board." Such was the senato- 
rial throng at the moment of my visit that we were thrust into 
a detached building made of half-inch planks, with wide 
openings between the boards; and as the French Canadian 
members were excited about the resignation of Mr. Gait, in- 
describable chattering and bawling filled the house. 

The view from the Parliament House is even more thor- 
oughly Canadian than that from the terrace at Quebec — a view 
of a land of rapids, of pine forests, and of lumberers' homes, 
full of character, but somewhat bleak and dreary; even on 
the hottest summer's day it tells of winter storms past and to 
come. On the far left are the island-filled reaches of the Up- 
per Ottawa ; nearer, the roaring Chaudiere Falls, a mile across 
— a mile of walls of water, of sudden shoots, of jets of spray. 
From the " caldron " itself, into which we can hardly see, rises 
a column of rainbow-tinted mist, backed by distant ranges and 
black woods, now fast falling before the settler's axe. Below 
you is the river, swift, and covered with cream-like foam ; on 
the right, a gorge — the mouth of the Rideau Canal. 

When surveyed from the fittest points, the Chaudiere is 
but little behind Niagara ; but it may be doubted whether in 
any fall there is that which can be called sublimity. ^N'atura] 
causes are too evident : water, rushing to find its level, falls 
from a ledge of rock. How different from a storm upon the 
coast, or from a September sunset, where the natural causes 
are so remote that you can bring yourself almost to see the 
immediate hand of God. It is excusable in Americans, who 
have no sea-coast worthy of the name, to talk of Niagara as 



68 Geeater Britain. 

the perfection of the sublime ; but it is strange that a people 
who have Birling Gap and Bantry Bay should allow them- 
selves to be led by such a cry. 

Niagara has one beauty in which it is unapproached by the 
great Chaudiere : the awesome slowness with which the deep- 
green flood, in the centre of the Horse-shoe Falls, rolls rather 
than plunges into the gulf. 



CHAPTER Vn. 

msriYEIiSITY OF MICHIGAN". 



From the gloom of Buffalo, the smoke of Cincinnati, and the 
dirt of Pittsburg, I should have been glad to escape as soon as 
might be, even had not the death from cholera of 240 persons 
in a single day of my visit at the " Queen City " warned me 
to fly north. From a stricken town, with its gutters full of 
chloride of lime, and fires burning .in the public streets, to 
green Michigan, was a grateful change ; but I was full of sor- 
row at leaving that richest and most lovely of all States — 
Ohio. There is a charm in the park-like beauty of the Mo- 
nongahela Valley, dotted with vines and orchards, that noth- 
ing in Eastern America can rival. The absence at once of 
stumps in the corn-fields, and of untilled or unfenced land, 
gives the " Buckeye State " a look of age that none of the 
" old Eastern States " can show. In corn, in meadow, in 
timber-land, Ohio stands alone. Her Indian corn exceeds in 
richness that of any other State ; she has ample stores of iron, 
and coal is worked upon the surface in every AUeghany val- 
ley. Wool, wine, hops, tobacco, all are raised ; her Catawba 
has inspired poems. Every river-side is clothed with groves 
of oak, of hickory, of sugar-maple, of sycamore, of poplar, and 
of buckeye. But, as I said, the change to the Michigan prairie 
was full of a delightful relief; it was Holland after the Rhine, 
London after Paris. 

Where men grow tall there will maize grow tall, is a good 
sound rule: limestone makes both bone and straw. The 
North-western States, inhabited by giant men, are the chosen 
home of the most useful and beautiful of plants, the maize — 



University of Michigan. 69 

in America called " corn." For hundreds of miles tlie rail- 
way track, protected not even by a fence or hedge, runs 
through the towering plants, which hide all prospect save that 
of their own green pyramids. Maize feeds the people ; it 
feeds the cattle and the hogs that they export to feed the 
cities of the East ; from it is made yearly, as an Ohio farmer 
told me, " whisky enough to float the ark." Rice is not more 
the support of the Chinese than maize of the Americans. 

In the great corn-field of the l*^orth-western States dwells 
a people without a history, without tradition, busy at hewing 
out of the forest-trunks codes and social usages of it» own. 
The Kansas men have set themselves to emancipating women ; 
the " Wolverines," as the people of Michigan are called, have 
turned their heads to education, and are teaching the teachers 
upon this point. 

The rapidity with which intellectual activity is awakened 
in the West is inexplicable to the people of ISTew England. 
While you are admiring the laws of Minnesota and Wiscon- 
sin, Boston men tell you that the resemblance of the code of 
Kansas to that of Connecticut is consequent only on the fact 
that the framers of the former possessed a copy of this one 
iN'ew England code, while they had never set eyes upon the 
code of any other country in the world. While Yale and 
Harvard are trying in vain to keep pace with the State uni- 
versities of Michigan and Kansas, you will meet in Lowell and 
iN'ew Haven men who apply an old Russian story to the West- 
ern colleges, and tell you that their professors of languages, 
when asked where they have studied, reply that they guess 
they learned to read and write in Springfield. 

One of the difiiculties of the New England colleges has 
been to reconcile university traditions with democracy ; but 
in the Western States there is neither reconciliation nor tradi- 
tion, though universities are plenty. Probably the most dem- 
ocratic school in the whole world is the State University of 
Michigan, situate at Ann Arbor, near Detroit. It is cheap, 
large, practical; twelve hundred students, paying only the 
ten dollars' entrance fee, and five dollars a year during resi- 
dence, and living where they can in the little town, attend the 
University to be prepared to enter with knowledge and reso- 
lution upon the affairs of their future life. A few only are 



70 Greater Britain. 

educated by having their minds unfolded that they may be- 
come many-sided men; but all work with spirit, and with 
that earnestness which is seen in the Scotch universities at. 
home. The war with crime, the war with sin, the war with 
death— ^Law, Theology, Medicine — these are the three fore- 
most of man's employments ; to these, accordingly, the Uni- 
versity affords her chiefest care, and to one of these the stu- 
dent, his entrance-examination passed, often gives his entire 
time. 

These things are democratic, but it is not in them that the 
essenthil democracy of the University is to be seen. There 
are at Michigan no honor-lists, no classes in our sense, no or- 
ders of merit, no competition. A man takes, or does not take, 
a certain degree. The University is governed, not by its 
members, not by its professors, but by a parliament of " re- 
gents " appointed by the inhabitants of the State. Such are 
the two great princij)les of the democratic University of the 
West. 

It might be supposed that these -two strange departures 
from the systems of older universities were irregularities, in- 
troduced to meet the temporary embarrassments incidental to 
educational establishments in young States. So far is this 
from being the case, that, as I saw at Cambridge, the clearest- 
sighted men of the older colleges of America are trying to as- 
similate their teaching system to that of Michigan — at least, 
in the one point of the absence of competition. They assert 
that toil performed under the excitement of a fierce struggle 
between man and man is unhealthy work, different in nature 
and in results from the loving labor of men whose hearts are 
really in what they do : toil, in short, not very easily distin- 
guishable from slave-labor. 

In the matter of the absence of competition, Michigan is 
probably but returning to the system of the European univer- 
sities of the Middle Ages, but the government by other than 
the members of the University is a still stranger scheme. It 
is explained when we look to the sources whence the funds of 
the University are drawn, namely, from the tax-payers of the 
State. The men who have set np this corporation in their 
midst, and who tax themselves for its support, can not be 
called on, as they say, to renounce its government to their 



University of Michigan. 71 

nominees, professors from New England, unconnected with 
the State, men of one idea, often quarrelsome, sometimes 
" irreligious " — for religious points have been contested bit- 
terly in the Senate of Ann Arbor. There is much truth in 
these statements of the case, but it is to be hoped that the 
men jchosen to serve as " regents " are of a higher intellectual 
stamp than those appointed to educational offices in the Can- 
adian backwoods. A report was put into my hands at Ot- 
tawa, in which a Superintendent of Instruction writes to the 
Minister of Education, that he had advised the rate-payers of 
Victoria County not in future to elect as school trustees men 
who can not read or write. As Michigan grows older, she 
will, perhaps, seek to conform to the practice of other univer- 
sities in this matter of her government, but in the point of 
absence of competition she is likely to continue firm. 

Even here some difficulty is found in getting competent 
school directors ; one of them reported 31|^ children attending 
school. Of another district its superintendent reports : " Con- 
duct of scholars about the same as that of * Young America ' 
in general." Some of the superintendents aim at jocosity, and 
show no want of talent in themselves, while their efforts afe 
to demonstrate its deficiency among the boys. The sujDerin- 
tendent of Grattan says, in answer to some numbered ques- 
tions : " Condition good, improvement fair ; for one-fourth of 
one-fourth of the year in school, and fifteen-sixteenths of the 
time at play. Male teachers most successful with the birch ; 
female, with Cupid's darts. School-houses in fair whittling or- 
der. ^2^9araiws.* shovel, none; tongs, ditto; poker, one. Con- 
duct of scholars like that of parents — good, bad, and indifferent. 
No minister in town — sorry; no lawyer — good!" The super- 
intendents of Manlius township report that Districts 1 and 2 
have buildings " fit (in winter) only for the polar bear, wal- 
rus, reindeer, Russian sable, or Siberian bat ;" and they go 
on to say, " Our children read every thing, from Mr. Noodle's 
Essays on Matrimony to Artemus Ward's Lecture on First 
Principles of American Government." Another report from 
a very new county runs : " Sunday - schools afford a little 
reading-matter to the children. Character of matter most 
read — battle, murder, and sudden death." A third states that 
the teachers are meanly paid, and goes on: "If the teaching 



72 Gkeater Britain. 

is no better than the pay, it must be like the soup that the 
rebels gave the prisoners." A superintendent, reporting that 
the success of the teachers is greater than their qualifications 
warrant, says : " The reason is to be found in the Yankeeish 
adajJtabiHty of even Wolverines." 

After all, it is hard even to pass jokes at the expense of the 
North-western people. A population who would maintain 
schools on such a footing under difficulties apparently over- 
whelming was the source from which to draw Union Volun- 
teers such as those who, after the war, returned to their North- 
ern homes, I have been told, shocked and astonished at the 
iirnorance and debasement of the Southern whites. 

The system of elective studies pursued at Michigan is one 
to which we are year by year tending in the English univer- 
sities. As sciences multiply and deepen, it becomes more and 
more impossible that a " general course " system can produce 
men fit to take their places in the world. Cambridge has at- 
tempted to set up both, and, giving her students the choice, 
bids them pursue one branch of study with a view to honors, 
or take a less-valued degree requiring some slight proficiency 
in many things. Michigan denies that the stimulus of honor 
examinations should be connected with the elective system. 
With her, men first graduate in science, or in an arts degree, 
which bears a close resemblance to the English "poll," and 
then pursue their elected study in a course which leads to no 
university distinction, which is free from the struggle for place 
and honors. These objections to "honors" rest upon a more 
solid foundation than a mere democratic hatred of inequality 
of man and man. Repute as a writer, as a practitioner, is val- 
ued by the Ann Arbor man, and the Wolverines do not follow 
the Ephesians, and tell men w^ho excel among them to go and 
excel elsewhere. The Michigan professors say, and Dr. 
Hedges bears them out, that a far higher average of true work 
?Lnd real knowledge is obtained under this system of independ- 
ent work than is dreamed of in colleges w^here competition 
rules. " A higher average " is all they say, and they acknowl- 
edge frankly that there is here and there a student to be found 
to whom competition would do good. As a rule, they tell us, 
this is not the case. Unlimited battle between man and man 
for place is sufficiently the bane of the world not to be made 



University of Michigan. 73 

the curse of schools : competition breeds every evil which it 
is the aim of education, the duty of a university, to suppress : 
pale faces caused by excessive toil, feverish excitement that 
prevents true work, a hatred of the subject on which the toil 
is spent, jealousy of best fi'iends, systematic depreciation of 
men's talents, rejection of all reading that will not "pay," 
extreme unhealthy cultivation of memory, general degrada- 
tion of labor — all these evils, and many more, are charged upon 
the competition system. . Every thing that our professors 
have to say of " cram," these American thinkers apply to com- 
petition. Strange doctrines these for Young America ! 

Of the practical turn which we should naturally expect to 
find in the university of a bran-new State I found evidence in 
the regulation which prescribes that the degree of Master of 
Arts shall not be conferred as a matter of course upon gradu- 
ates of three years' standing, but only upon such as have pur- 
sued professional or general scientific studies during that pe- 
riod. Even in these cases an examination before some one of 
the faculties is required for the Master's degree. I was told 
that for the Medical degree four years of " reputable " practice 
is received instead of certain courses. 

In her special and selected studies, Michigan is as merely 
practical as Swift's University of Brobdingnag ; but, standing 
far above the ordinary arts or science courses, there is a 
" University course " designed for those who have already 
taken the Bachelor's degree. It is harder to say what this 
course includes than what it does not. The twenty heads 
range over philology, philosophy, art, and science ; there is a 
branch of " criticism," one of " arts of design," one of " fine 
arts." Astronomy, ethics, and Oriental languages are all em- 
braced in a scheme brought into working order within ten 
years of the time when Michigan was a wilderness, and the 
college-yard an Indian hunting-ground. 

Michigan entered upon education-work very early in her 
history as a State. In 1850 her Legislature commissioned the 
Hon. Ira Mayhew to prepare a work on education for circula- 
tion throughout America. Her progress has been as rapid as 
her start was good ; her natural history collection is already 
one of the most remarkable in America ; her medical school 
is almost unequalled, and students flow to her even from New 

D 



74 Greater Britain. 

England and from California, while from New York she draws 
a hmidred men a year. In only one point is Ann Arbor any- 
where but in the van : she has hitherto followed the ISTew En- 
gland colleges in excluding women. The State University of 
Kansas has not shown the same exclusiveness that has charac- 
terized the conduct of the rulers of Michigan : women are ad- 
mitted not only to the classes, but to the professorships at 
Lawrence. 

This UsTorth-western institution at Ann Arbor was not be- 
hind even Harvard in the war : it supplied the Union army 
with 1000 men. The l7th Regiment of Michigan Volunteers, 
mainly composed of teachers and Ann Arbor students, has no 
cause to fear the rivalry of any other record ; and such was 
the effect of the war, that in 1860 there were in Michigan 
2600 male to 5350 female teachers, whereas now there are but 
1300 men to 7500 women. 

So proud are Michigan men of their Roll of Honor that 
they publish it at full length in the calendar of the University. 
Every " class " from the foundation of the schools shows some 
graduates distinguished in their country's service during the 
suppression of the rebellion. The Hon. Oramel Hosford, Su- 
perintendent of Public Instruction in Michigan, reports that, 
owing to the presence of crowds of returned soldiers, the 
schools of the State are filled almost to the limit of their ca- 
pacity, while some are compelled to close their doors against 
the thronging crowds. Captains, colonels, generals are among 
the students now humbly learning in the Ann Arbor Univer- 
sity Schools. 

The State of Michigan is peculiar in the form that she has 
given to her higher teaching, but in no way peculiar in the at- 
tention she bestows on education. Teaching, high and low, is 
a passion in the West, and each of these young States has es- 
tablished a University of the highest order, and placed in every 
township not only schools, but public libraries, supported from 
the rates, and managed by the people. 

Not only have the appropriations for educational purposes 
by each State been large, but those of the Federal Government 
have been upon the most splendid scale. What has been done 
in the Eastern and the Central States no man can tell, but 
even west of the Mississippi twenty- two million acres have al- 



The Pacific Eailroad. 75 

ready been granted for such purposes, while fifty-six million 
mote are set aside for similar gifts. 

The Americans are not forgetful of their Puritan tradi- 
tions. 



CHAPTER YIII. 

THE PACIFIC KAILEOAD. 



When the companions of the explorer Cartier found that 
the rapids at Montreal were not the end of all navigation, as 
they had feared, but that above them there commenced a sec- 
ond and boundless reach of deep, still waters, they fancied 
they had found the long-looked-for route to China, and cried, 
" La Chine !" So the story goes, and the name has stuck to 
the place. 

Up to 1861 the Canadians remained in the belief that they 
were at least the potential possessors of the only possible road 
for the China trade of the future, for in that year a Canadian 
Government paper declared that the Rocky Mountains south of 
British territory were impassable for railroads. Maps showed 
that from St. Louis to San Francisco the distance was twice 
that from the head of navigation on Lake Superior to the Brit- 
ish Pacific ports. 

America has gone through a five years' agony since that 
time ; but now, in the first days of peace, we find that the 
American Pacific Railroad, growing at the average rate of two 
miles a day at one end, and one mile a day at the other, will 
stretch from sea to sea in 1869 or 1870, while the British Hne 
remains a dream. 

Not only have the Rocky Mountains turned out to be passa- 
ble, but the engineers have found themselves compelled to de- 
cide on the conflicting claims of passes without number. 
Wall-like and frowning as the Rocky Mountains are when 
seen from the plains, the rolling gaps are many, and they are 
easier crossed by railway fines than the less lofty chains of 
Europe. From the heat of the country, the snow-line lies 
high ; the chosen pass is in the latitude of Constantinople or 
Oporto. The dryness of the air of the centre of a vast conti- 



PT 



¥_l 




^ ■ The Pacific Railroad. 77 

• 
nent prevents the fall of heavy snows or rains in winter. At 

eight or nine thousand feet above the sea, in the Black Hills, 

or Eastern Piedmont, the drivers on the Pacific line will have 

slighter snow-drifts to encounter than their brothers on the 

Grand Trunk or the Camden and Amboy at the sea -level. 

On the other hand, fuel and water are scarce, and there is an 

endless succession of smaller snowy chains which have to be 

crossed upon the Grand Plateau, or basin of the Great Salt 

Lake. Whatever the difficulties, in 1869 or 1870 the line 

will be an accomplished fact. 

In the act creating the Pacific Railroad Company, passed 
in 1862, the company were bound to complete their line at 
the rate of a hundred miles a year. They are completing it 
at more than three times that rate. 

When the act is examined, it ceases to be strange that the 
road should be pushed with extraordinary energy and speed, 
so numerous are the baits offered to the companies to hasten 
its completion. Money is to be advanced them; land is to be 
given them for every mile they finish — on a generous scale while 
the line is on the plains, on three times the scale when it reach- 
es the most rugged tracts. These grants alone are estimated 
at twenty millions of acres. Besides the alternate sections, a 
width of 400 feet, with additional room for works and sta- 
tions, is granted for the line. The Californian Company is 
tempted by similar offers to a race with the Union Pacific, 
and each company is struggling to lay the most miles, and get 
the most land upon the great basin. It is the interest of the 
Eastern Company that the junction should be as far as possi- 
ble to the west ; of the Western, that it should be as far as 
possible to the east. The result is an average laying of three 
and an occasional construction of four miles a day. If we 
look to the progress at both ends, we find as much sometimes 
laid in a day as a bullock-train could travel. So fast do the 
head-quarters " cities " keep moving forward, that at the Cal- 
ifornian end the superintendent wished me to believe that 
whenever his chickens heard a wagon pass, they threw them- 
selves upon their backs, and held up their legs, that they might 
be tied, and thrown into the cart for a fresh move, " They 
are true birds of passage," he said. 

When the iron trains are at the front, the laying will for a 



78 Greater Britain. 

short time proceed at the Tate of nine yards in every fifteen 
seconds ; but three or four hundred tons of rails have to be 
brought up every day upon the single track, and it is in this 
that the time is lost. 

The advance carriages of the construction-train are well sup- 
plied with rifles hung from the roofs ; but even when the In- 
dians forget their amaze, and attack the " city upon wheels " 
or tear up the track, they are incapable of destroying the line 
so fast as the machinery can lay it down. " Soon," as a Den- 
ver paper said during my stay in the Mountain City, " the 
iron horse will sniff the Alpine breeze upon the summit of the 
Black Hills 9000 feet above the city ;" and upon the plateau, 
where deer are scarce and buffalo unknown, the Indians have 
all but disappeared. The worst Indian country is already 
crossed, and the red men have sullenly followed the buffalo to 
the south, and occupy the country between Kansas State and 
Denver, contenting themselves with preventing the construc- 
tion of the Santa Fe and Denver routes to California. Both 
for the end in view, and the energy with which it is pursued, 
the Pacific Railroad will stand first among the achievements 
of our times. 

If the end to be kept in view in the construction of the 
first Pacific Railroad line were merely the trafiic from China 
and Japan to Europe, or the shortest route from San Francisco 
to Hampton Roads, the Kansas route through St. Louis, Den- 
ver, and the Berthoud Pass would be, perhaps, the best and 
shortest of those within the United States ; but the Saskatche- 
wan line through British territory, with Halifax and Puget 
Sound for ports, would be still more advantageous. As it is, 
the true question seems to be, not the trade between the Pa- 
cific and Great Britain, but between Asia and America, for 
Pennsylvania and Ohio must be the manufacturing countries 
of the next fifty years. 

Whatever our theory, the fact is plain enough : in 1870 we 
shall reach San Francisco from London in less time than by 
the severest travelling I can reach it from Denver in 1866. 

Wherever, in the States, ISTorth and South have met in con- 
flict, North has won. New York has beaten Norfolk ; Chi- 
cago, in spite of its inferior situation, has beaten the older St. 
Louis. In the same way, Omaha, or cities still farther north, 



The Pacific Kailroad. 79 

will cany off the trade from Leavenworth, Lawrence, and Kan- 
sas City. Ultimately Puget Sound may beat San Francisco 
in the race for the Pacific trade, and the Southern cities be- 
come still less able to keep their place than they have been 
hitherto. Time after time Chicago has thrown out intercept- 
ing lines, and diverted from St. Louis trade which seemed of 
necessity to belong to her ; and the success of the Union Pa- 
cific line, and failure of the Kansas road, is a fresh proof of 
the superior energy of the ll^orthern to the Southern city. 
This time a fresh element enters into the calculation, and de- 
clares for Chicago. The great circle route, the true straight 
line, is in these great distances shorter by fifty or a hundred 
miles than the straight lines of the maps and charts, and the 
Platte route becomes not only the natural, but the shortest 
route from sea to sea. 

Chicago has a great advantage over St. Louis in her com- 
parative freedom from the cholera, which yearly attacks the 
Missourian city. During my stay in St. Louis the deaths 
from cholera alone were known to have reached 200 a day, in 
a population diminished by flight to 180,000. A quarantine 
was established on the river ; the sale of fruit and vegetables 
prohibited ; prisoners released on condition that they should 
work at burying the dead ; and funeral corteges were forbid- 
den. Chicago herself, unreached by the plague, was scatter- 
ing handbills on every Western railroad line, warning immi- 
grants against St. Louis. 

The Missourians have relied overmuch upon the Mississip- 
pi River, and have forgotten that railroads are superseding 
steam-boats every day. Chicago, on the other hand, which 
ten years ago was the twentieth city in America, is probably 
by this time the third. As a centre of thought, political and 
religious, she stands second only to Boston, and her Wabash 
and Michigan avenues are among the most beautiful of 
streets. 

One of the chief causes of the future wealth of America is 
to be found in the fact that all her "inland" towns are ports. 
The State of Michigan lies between 500 and 600 miles from 
the ocean, but the single State has upon the great lakes a 
coast of 1500 miles. From Fort Benton to the sea by water 
is nearly 4000 miles ; but the post is a much-used steam-boat 



80 Geeater Britain. 

port, though more distant, even in the air-line, from the nearest 
sea upon the same side the dividing range, than is the White 
Sea from the Persian Gulf. Put it in which way you would, 
Europe could not hold this navigation. 

A great American city is almost invariably placed at a 
point where an important railroad finds an outport on a lake 
or river. This is no adaptation to railways of the Limerick 
saying about rivers, namely, that Providence has everywhere 
so placed them as to pass through the great towns ; for in 
America railways precede population, and when mapped out 
and laid, they are but tram-ways in the desert. There is no 
great wonder in this when we remember that 158,000,000 acres 
of land have been up to this time granted to lailroads ii7. 
America. 

One tendency of a costly railroad system is that few lines 
will be made, and trade being thus driven into certain un- 
changing routes, a small number of cities will flourish greatly, 
and, by acting as housing stations or as ports, will rise to 
enormous wealth and population. Where a system of cheap 
railways is adopted, there will be, year by year, a tendency to 
multiply lines of traffic, and consequently to multiply also ports 
and seats of trade^a tendency, however, which may be more 
than neutralized by any special circumstances which may cause 
the lines of transit to converge rather than run parallel to one 
another. Of the system of costly grand trunk lines we have 
an instance in India, where we see the creation of Umritsar and 
the prosperity of Calcutta alike due to our single great Ben- 
gal line ; of the converging system, we have excellent instances 
in Chicago and Bombay ; while we see the plan of parallel 
lines in action here in Kansas, and causing the comparative 
equality of progress manifested in Leavenworth, in Atchison, 
in Omaha. The coasts of India swarmed with ports till our 
trunk lines ruined Goa and Surat to advance Bombay, and a 
hundred village ports to push our factory at Calcutta, found- 
ed by Charnock as late as 1690, but now grown to be the third 
or fourth city of the empire. 

Of the dozen chaotic cities which are* struggling for the 
honor of becoming the future capital of the West, Leaven- 
worth, with 20,000 people, three daily papers, an opera-house, 
and 200 drinking-saloons, was, at the time of my visit in 1866, 



The Pacific Kailroad. 81 

somewhat ahead of Omaha, with its 12,000, two papers, and 
a single " one-horse " theatre, though the Northern city tied 
Leavenworth in the point of " saloons." 

Omaha, Leavenworth, Kansas City, Wyandotte, Atchison, 
Topeka, Lecompton, and Law^rence, each praises itself, and runs 
down its neighbor. Leavenworth claims to be so healthy that 
when it lately became necessary to "inaugurate" the new 
grave-yard, " they had to shoot a man on purpose " — a change 
since the days when the Southern Border Ruffians were in the 
habit of parading its streets, bearing the scalps of Abolition- 
ists stuck on poles. On the other hand, a ISTebraska man, when 
asked whether the Kansas people were fairly honest, said : 
*' Don't know about honest, but they do say as how the folk 
around take in their stone fences every night." Lawrence, 
the State capital, which is on the dried-up Kansas River, 
sneeringly says of all the new towns on the Missouri that the 
boats that ply between them are so dangerous that the fare 
is collected in installments every five minutes throughout the 
trip. N^ext after the jealousy between two Australian colonies, 
there is nothing equal to the hatreds between cities competing 
for the same trade. Oniaha has now the best chance of be- 
coming the capital of the Far West, but Leavenworth will no 
doubt continue to be the chief town of Kansas. 

The progress of the snialler cities is amazing. Pistol-shots 
by day and night are frequent, but trade and development 
are little interfered with by such incidents as these ; and as 
the village-cities are peopled up, the pioneers, shunning their 
fellows, keep pushing westward, seeking new "locations." 
"You're the second man Pve seen this fall! Darn me, ef 
'tain't 'bout time to varmose out westerly — y," is the standing 
joke of the "frontier-bars " against each other. 

* *I* «t* «Z* aia •!• ^ 

^ ^ ^ ^ v{« ^ 

At St. Louis I had met my friend Mr. Hepworth Dixon, 
just out from England, and with ■ him I visited the Kansas 
towns, and then pushed through Waumego to Manhattan, the 
terminus (for the day) of the Kansas Pacific line. Here we 
were thrust into what space remained between forty leathern 
mail-bags and the canvas roof of the mule-drawn ambulance, 
which was to be at once our prison for six nights, and our 
fort upon wheels against the Indians. 

D2 



82 Greater Britain. 



CHAPTER IX. 

OMPHALISM. 

Dashen'G through a grove of cottonwood-trees draped in 
bignonia and ivy, we came out suddenly upon a charming 
scene ; a range of huts and forts crowning a long, low hill 
seamed with many a timber-clothed ravine, while the clear 
stream of the Republican fork wreathed itself about the woods 
and bluffs. The block-house, over which floated the stars and 
stripes, was Fort Riley, the Hyde Park Corner from which 
continents are to measure all their miles ; the " capital ©f the 
universe," or " centre of the world." Not that it has always 
been so. Geographers will, be glad to learn that not only 
does the earth gyrate, but that the centre of its crust also 
moves : within the last ten years it has removed westward 
into Kansas from Missouri, from Independence to Fort Riley. 
The contest for centreship is no new thing. Herodotus held 
that Greece was the very middle of the world, and that the 
unhappy Orientals were frozen, and the yet more unfortunate 
Atlantic Indians baked every afternoon of their poor lives in 
order that the sun might shine on Greece at noon ; London 
plumes herself on being the "centre of the terrestrial globe;" 
Boston is the " hub of the hull universe," though the latter 
claim is less physical than moral, I believe. In Fort Riley, 
the "Western men seem to have found the physical centre of 
the United States, but they claim for the Great Plains as well 
the intellectual as the political leadership of the whole conti- 
nent. These hitherto untrodden tracts, they tell you, form the 
heart of the empire, from which the life-blood must be driven 
to the extremities. Geographical and political centr^ must 
ultimately coincide. 

Connected with this belief is another Western theory — 
that the powers of the future must be " Continental." Ger- 
many, or else Russia, is to absorb all Asia and Europe except 
Britain. North America is already cared for, as the gradual 
extinction of the Mexicans and absorption of the Canadians 
they consider certain. As for South America, the Californians 



OlCPHALISM. 83 

are already planning an occupation of Western BrazU, on the 
ground that the continental power of South America must 
start from the head-waters of the great rivers, and spread sea- 
ward down the streams. Even in the Brazilian climate they 
believe that the Anglo-Saxon is destined to become the domi- 
nant race. 

The success of this omphalism, this government from the 
centre, will be brought about, in the Western belief, by the 
necessity under which the natives on the head-waters of all 
streams will find themselves of having the outlets in their 
hands. Even if it be true that railways are beating rivers, 
still the railways must also lead seaward to the ports, and the 
need for their control is still felt by the producers in the cen- 
tre countries of the continent. The Upper States must every- 
where command the Lower, and salt-water despotism find its 
end. 

The Americans of the Valley States, who fought all the 
more heartily in the Federal cause from the fact that they 
were battling for the freedom of the Mississippi against the 
men who held its mouth, look forward to the time when they 
will have to assert, peaceably but with firmness, their right to 
the freedom of their railways through the Northern Atlantic 
States. Whatever their respect for New England, it can not 
be expected that they are forever to permit Illinois and Ohio 
to be neutralized in the Senate by Rhode Island and Vermont. 
If it goes hard with New England, it will go still harder with 
New York; and the Western men look forward to the day 
when Washington will be removed. Congress and all, to Co- 
lumbus or Fort Riley. 

The singular wideness of Western thought, always verging 
on extravagance, is traceable to the width of Western land. 
The immensity of the continent produces a kind of intoxica- 
tion ; there Is moral dram-drinking in the contemplation of 
the map. No Fourth of July Oration can come up to the 
plain facts contained in the Land Commissioners' Report. 
The public domain of the United States still consists of one 
thousand five hundred millions of acres ; there are two hun- 
dred thousand square miles of coal-lands in the country, ten 
times as much as in all the remaining world. In the Western 
Territories not yet States, there is land sufficient to bear, at the 



84 Greater Brktain. 

to 

English population-rate, five hundred and fifty millions of hu- 
man beings. 

It is strange to see how the Western country dwarfs the 
Eastern States. Buffalo is called a " Western city ;" yet from 
New York to Buffalo is only three hundred and fifty miles, 
and Buffalo is but seven hundred miles to the west of the 
most eastern point in all the United States. On the other 
hand, from Buffalo we can go two thousand five hundred 
miles westward without quitting the United States. "The 
West " is eight times as wide as the Atlantic States, and will 
soon be eight times as strong. 

The conformation of N'orth America is widely different to 
that of any other continent on the globe. In Europe, the gla- 
ciers of the Alps occupy the centre point, and shed the waters 
toward each of the surrounding seas : confluence is almost 
unknown. So it is in Asia : there the Indus flowing into the 
Arabian Gulf, the Oxus into the Sea of Aral, the Ganges into 
the Bay of Bengal, the Yangtse Kiang into the Pacific, and 
the Yenesei into the Arctic Ocean, all take their rise in the 
central table-land. In South America, the mountains form a 
wall upon the west, whence the rivers flow eastward in par- 
allel lines. In Il^orth America alone are there mountains 
on each coast, and a trough between, into which the rivers 
flow together, giving in a single valley 23,000 miles of nav- 
igable stream to be plowed by steam-ships. The map pro- 
claims the essential unity of North America. Political geog- 
raphy might be a more interesting study than it has yet been 
made. 

In reaching Leavenworth, I had crossed two of the five di- 
visions of America : the other three lie before me on my way 
to San Francisco. The eastern slopes of the AUeghanies, or 
Atlantic coast; their western slopes; the Great Plains; the 
Grand Plateau, and the Pacific coast — these are the five divis- 
ions. Fort Riley, the centre of the United States, is upon 
the border of the third division, thq Great Plains. The At- 
lantic coast is poor and stony, but the slight altitude of the 
Alleghany chains has prevented it being a hinderance to the 
passage of population to the West : the second of the divis- 
. ions is now the richest and most powerful of the five; but 
the wave of immigration is crossing the Mississippi and Mis- 



Letter from Denter. So 

souri into the Great Plains, and here at Fort Riley we are 
upon the limit of civilization. 

This spot is not only the centre of the United States and 
of the continent, but, if Denver had contrived to carry the Pa- 
cific Railroad by the Berthoud Pass, would have been the cen- 
tre station upon what Governor Gilpin of Colorado calls the 
"Asiatic and European railway line." As it is, Columbus in 
Nebraska has somewhat a better chance of becoming the 
Washington of the future than has this block-house. 

Quitting Fort Riley, we found ourselves at once upon the 
Plains. Xo more sycamore, and white-oak, and honey-locust ; 
no more of the rich deep green of the cottonwood groves ; but 
yellow earth, yellow flowers, yellow grass, and here and there 
groves of giant sunflowers with yellow blooms, but no more 
trees. 

As the sun set, we came on a body of cavalry marching 
slowly from the Plains toward the fort. Before them, at some 
little distance, walked a sad-faced man on foot, in sober riding- 
dress, with a repeating carbine slung across his back. It was 
Sherman returning from his expedition to Santa Fe. 



CHAPTER X. 

LETTER FEOM DENVER. 

Monday, 3d September. 
My dear , — Here we are, scalps and all. 

On Tuesday last, at sundown, we left Fort Riley, and, sup- 
ped at Junction City, the extreme point that " civilization " has 
reached upon the Plains. Civilization means whisky; post- 
ofiices don't count. 

It was here that it first dawned upon us that we were be- 
ing charged 500 dollars to guard the United States Calif orni- 
an mail, with the compensation of the chance of being our- 
selves able to rob it with impunity. It is, at all events, the 
case that we, well-armed as the mail-oificers at Leavenworth in- 
sisted on our being, sat inside with forty-two cwt. of mail, in 
open bags, and over a great portion of the route had only the 
driver with us, without whose knowledge we could have read 



Letter from Denver. 87 

all and stolen most of the letters, and with whose knowledge, 
but against whose will, we could have carried off the whole, 
leaving him gagged, bound, and at the mercy of the Indians. 
As it was, a mail-bag fell out one day, without the knowledge 
of either Dixon or the driver, who were outside, and I had to 
shout pretty freely before they would pull up. 

On Wednesday we had our last " squar' meal " in the shape 
of a breakfast at Fort Ellsworth, and soon were out upon the 
almost unknown Plains. In the morning we caught up and 
passed long wagon-trains, each wagon drawn by eight oxen,' 
and guarded by two drivers and one horseman, all armed with 
breech-loading rifles and revolvers, or with the new " repeat- 
ers," before which breech-loaders and revolvers must alike go 
down. All day we kept a sharp lookout for a party of seven 
American oificers, who, in defiance of the scout's advice, had 
gone out from the fort to hunt buffalo upon the track. 

About sundown we came into the little station of Lost 
Creek. The ranchmen told us that they had, during the day, 
been driven in from their work by a party of Cheyennes, and 
that they had some doubts as to the wisdom of the officers in 
going out to hunt. They had passed here at midday. 

Just as we were leaving the station, one of the officers' 
horses dashed in riderless, and was caught ; and about two . 
miles from the station we passed another on its back, ripped 
up either by a knife or buffalo-horn. The saddle was gone, 
but there were no other marks of a fight. We believe that 
these officers were routed by buffalo, riot Cheyennes, but still 
we should be glad to hear of them. 

The track is marked in many parts of the plains by stakes, 
such as those from which the Llano Estacado takes its name ; 
but this evening we turned off into devious lines by way of pre- 
caution against ambuscades, coming round through the sandy 
beds of streams to the ranches for the change of mules. The 
ranchmen were always ready for us ; for, while we were still a 
mile away, our driver would put his hand to his mouth, and give 
a " How ! how ! how ! how — ^w !" the Cheyenne war-whoop. 

In the weird glare that foUows sunset we came upon a pile 
of rocks admirably fitted for an ambush. As we neared them, 
the driver said : " It's 'bout an even chance thet we's sculp 
ther' !" We could not avoid them, as there was a gully that 



88 Greater Britain. 

could only be crossed at this one point. We dashed down 
into the " creek " and up again, past the rocks : there were no 
Indians, but the driver was most uneasy till we reached Big 
Creek. 

Here they could give us nothing whatever to eat, the In- 
dians having, on Tuesday, robbed them of every thing they had, 
and ordered them to leave within fifteen days on pain of death. 

For 250 miles westward from Big Creek we found that ev- 
ery station -had been warned (and most plundered) by bands 
* of Cheyennes, on behalf of the forces of the confederation en- 
camped near the creek itself. The warning was in all cases 
that of fire and death at the end of fifteen days, of which nine 
days have expired. We found the horse-keepers of the com- 
pany everywhere leaving their stations, and were, in conse- 
quence, very nearly starved, having been unsuccessful in our 
shots from the " coach," except, indeed, at the snakes. 

On Thursday we passed Big Timber, the only spot on the 
Plains where there are trees ; and there the Indians had count- 
ed, the trees, and solemnly warned the men against cutting 
more : "Fifty-two tree. You no cut more tree — no more cut. 
Grass ! . You cut grass; grass make big fire. You good boy 
— you clear out. Fifteen day, we come : you no gone — ugh !" 
The " ugh " accompanied by an expressive pantomime. 

On Thursday evening we got a meal of buffalo and prairie- 
dog, the former too strong for my failing stomach, the latter 
wholesome nourishment, and fit for kings — as like our rabbit 
in flavor as he is in shape. This was at the horse-station of 
"The Monuments," a natural temple of awesome grandeur, ris- 
ing from the plains like a giant Stonehenge. 

On Friday we " breakfasted " at Pond Creek Station, two 
miles from Fort Wallis. Here the people had applied for a 
guard, and had been answered, " Come into the fort ; we can't 
spare a man." So much for the value of the present forts ; 
and yet even these — WaUis and Ellsworth — are 200 miles 
apart. 

We were joined at breakfast by Bill Comstock, interpreter 
to the fort — along-haired, wild-eyed half-breed— who gave us, 
in an hour's talk, the full history of the Indian politics that 
have led to the present war. 

The Indians, to the number of 20,000, have been in council 



Letter from Denver. 89 

with the Washington Commissioners all this summer at Fort 
Laramie ; and, after being clothed, fed, and armed, lately con- 
cluded a treaty, allowing the running on the mail-roads. They 
now assert that this treaty was intended to apply to 'the Platte 
Road (from Omaha and Atchison, through Fort Kearney) and 
to the Arkansas Road, but not to the Smoky Hill Road, which 
lies between the others, and runs through the buffalo country ; 
but their real opposition is to the railroad. The Cheyennes 
(pronounced Shians) have got the Comanches, Apaches, and 
Arapahoes from the south, and the Sioux and Kiowas from the 
north, to join them in a confederation, under the leadership of 
Spotted Dog, the chief of the Little Dog section of the Chey- 
ennes, and son of White Antelope — killed at Sand Creek bat- 
tle by the Kansas and Colorado Volunteers — who has sworn 
to avenge his father. 

Soon after leaving Pond Creek, we sighted at a distance 
three mounted " braves " leading some horses ; and when we 
reached the next station, we found that they had been there, 
openly proclaiming that their " mounts " had been stolen from 
a team. 

AU. this day we sat with our revolvers laid upon the mail- 
bags in front of us, and our driver also had his armory conspic- 
•uously displayed, while we swept the Plains with many an anx- 
ious glance. We were on lofty rolling downs, and to the south 
the eye often ranged over much of the ISO miles which lay 
between us and Texas. To the north the view was more 
bounded ; still our chief danger lay near the boulders which 
here and there covered the Plains. 

All Thursday and Friday we never lost sight of the buffalo, 
in herds of about 300, and the " antelope" — the prong-horn, a 
kind of gazelle — in flocks of about six or seven. Prairie-dogs 
were abundant, and wolves and blaek4ail deer in view every 
hour or two. , 

The most singular of all the sights of the Plains is the pres- 
ence every few yards of the skeletons of buffalo and of horse, 
of mule and of ox ; the former left by the hunters, who take 
but the skin, and the latter the losses of the mails and the wag- 
on-trains, through sun-stroke and thirst. We killed a hars@ 
on the second day of our journey. 

When we came upon oxen that had not long been deadj woi 



90 Greater Britain. 

found that the intense dryness of the air had made mummies 
of them ; there was no stench, no putrefaction. 

During the day I made some practice at antelope with the 
driver's Ballard ; but an antelope at 500 yards is not a good 
target. The drivers shot repeatedly at buffalo at twenty 
yards, but this only to keep them away from the horses ; the 
revolver balls did not seem to go through their hair and skin, 
as they merely shambled on in their usual happy sort of way 
after receiving a discharge or two. 

The prairie-dogs sat barking in thousands on the tops of 
their mounds, but we were too grateful to them for their gay- 
ety to dream of pistol-shots. They are no " dogs " at all, but 
rabbits that bark, with all the cony's tricks and turns, and the 
same odd way of rubbing their face with their paws while 
they con you from top to toe. 

With wolves, buffalo, antelope, deer, skunks, dogs, plover, 
curlew, dotterel, herons, vultures, ravens, snakes, and locusts, 
we never seemed to be without a million companions in our 
loneliness. . 

From Cheyenne Wells, where we changed mules in the 
afternoon, we brought on the ranchman's wife, painfully mak- 
ing room for her at our own expense. Her husband had been 
warned by the Cheyennes that the place would be destroyed :. 
he meant to stay, but was in fear for her. The Cheyennes 
had made her work for them, and our supper had gone down 
Cheyenne throats. 

Soon after leaving the station we encountered one of the 
great " dirt-storms " of the Plains. About 5 p.m. we saw a 
little white cloud growing into a column, which in half an 
hour turned black as night, and possessed itself of half the 
skies. We then saw what seemed to be a water-spout ; and, 
though no rain reached us, I think it was one. When the 
storm burst on us, we took if for rain ; and, halting, we drew 
down our canvas, and held it against the hurricane. We soon 
found that our eyes and mouths were full of dust ; and when 
I put out my hand, I felt that it was dirt, not rain, that was 
falling. In a few minutes it was pitch dark ; and after the 
fall had continued for some time, there began a series of flash- 
es of blinding lightning, in the very centre and midst of which 
we seemed to be. Notwithstanding this, there was no sound 



Letter from Denver. 91 

of thunder. The " ISTorther " lasted some three or four hours, 
and when it ceased, it left us total darkness, and a wind which 
froze our marrow, as we again started on our way. When 
Fremont explored this route, he reported that this high ridge 
between the Platte and Arkansas was notorious among the 
Indians for its tremendous dirt-storms. Sheet-lightning with- 
out thunder accompanies dust-storms in all great continents : 
it is as common in the Punjaub as in Australia, in South as in 
North America. 

On Saturday morning, at Lake Station, we got beyond the 
Indians, and into a land of plenty, or, at all events, a land of 
something, for we got milk from the station cow, and pre- 
served fruits that had come round through Denver from Ohio 
and Kentucky. Not even on Saturday, though, could we get 
dinner ; and as I missed the only antelope that came within 
reach, our supper was not much heavier than our breakfast. 

Rolling through the Arapahoe country, where it is pro- 
posed to make a reserve for the Cheyennes, at eight o'clock in 
the morning we had caught sight of the glittering snows of 
Pike's Peak, a hundred and fifty miles away, and all the day 
we were galloping toward it, through a country swarming 
with rattlesnakes and vultures. Late in the evening, wheii 
we were drawing near to the first of the Coloradan farms, we 
came on a white wolf unconcernedly taking his evening prowl 
about the stock-yards. He sneaked along without taking any 
notice of us, and continued his thief-like walk with a bravery 
that seemed only to show that he had never seen man before : 
this might well be the case if he came from the south, near 
the upper forks of the Arkansas. 

All this, and the frequency of buffalo, I was unprepared 
for. I imagined that though the Plains were uninhabited, the 
game had all been killed. On the contrary, the " Smoky dis- 
trict " was never known so thronged with buffalo as it is this 
year. The herds resort to it because there they are close to 
the water of the Platte River, and yet out of the reach of the 
traffic of the Platte Road. The tracks they make in travelling 
to and fro across the Plains are visible for years after they 
have ceased to use them. I have seen them as broad and as 
straight as the finest of Roman roads. 

On Sunday, at two in the morning, we dashed into Den- 



92 Greater Britain. ^'' 

ver ; and as we reeled and staggered from our late prison, the 
ambulance, into the " cockroach corral " which does duty for 
the bar-room of the " Planters' House," we managed to find 
strength and words to agree that we would fix no time for 
meeting the next day. We expected to sleep for thirty hours : 
as it was, we met at breakfast at seven a.m., less than five 
hours from the time at which we parted. It is to-day that 
we feel exhausted ; the exhilaration of the mountain air, and 
the excitement of frequent visits, carried us through yester- 
day. Dixon is suffering from strange blains and boils, caused 
by the unwholesome food. 

"We have been called upon here by Governor Gilpin and 
Governor Cummings, the opposition governors. The former 
is the elected governor of the State of Colorado which is to 
be, and would have been but for the fact that the President 
put his Mg toe (Western for veto) upon the bill ; the latter, 
the Washington-sent governor of the Territory. Gilpin is a 
typical pioneer man, and the descendant of a line of such. 
He comes of one of the original Quaker stocks of Maryland, 
and he and his ancestors have ever been engaged in founding 
States. He himself, after taking an active share in the foun- 
dation of Kansas, commanded a regiment of cavalry in the 
Mexican War. After this, he was at the head of the pioneer 
army which explored the pares of the Cordilleras and the Ter- 
ritory of Nevada. He it was who hit upon the glorious idea 
of placing Colorado half upon each side of the Sierra Madre. 
There never in the history of the world was a grander idea 
than this. Any ordinary pioneer or politician would have 
given Colorado the " natural " frontier, and have tried for the 
glory of the foundation of two States instead of one. The 
consequence would have been the lasting disunion between 
the Pacific and Atlantic States, and a possible future break- 
up of the country. As it is, this commonwealth, little as it 
at present is, links sea to sea, and Liverpool to Hong Kong. 

The city swarms with Indians of the bands commanded by 
the chiefs ISTevara and Colloreyo. They are at war with the 
six confederate tribes, and with the Pawnees — with all the 
Plain Indians, in short. Now, as the Pawnees are also fight- 
ing with the six tribes, there is a pretty triangular war. 
They came in to buy arms, and fearful scoundrels they look. 



Letter from Denver. 93 

Short, flat-nosed, long-haired, painted in red and blue, and 
dressed in a gaudy costume, half-Spanish, half-Indian, which 
makes their filthiness appear more filthy by contrast, and them- 
selves carrying only their Ballard and Smith-and-Wesson, but 
forcing the squaws to carry all their other goods, and pa- 
pooses in addition, they present a spectacle of unmixed ruffian- 
ism which I never expect to see surpassed. Dixon and I, both 
of us, left London with " Lo ! the poor Indian," in all his dig- 
nity and hook-nosedness, elevated on a pedestal of nobility 
in our hearts. Our views were shaken in the East, but noth- 
ing revolutionized them so rapidly as our three days' risk of 
scalping in the Plains. John Howard and Mrs. Beecher 
Stowe themselves would go in for the Western "disarm at 
any price, and exterminate if necessary " policy if they lived 
long in Denver. One of the braves of Nevara's command 
brought in the scalp of a Cheyenne chief taken by him last 
month, and to-day it hangs outside the door of a pawn-broker's 
shop for sale, fingered by every passer-by. 

Many of the band were engaged in putting on their paint, 
which was bright vermilion, with a little indigo round the 
eye. This, with the sort of pigtail which they wear, gives 
them the look of the gnomes in the introduction to a London 
pantoinime. One of them— Nevara himself, I was told — wore 
a. sombrero with three scarlet plumes, taken probably from a 
Mexican, a crimson jacket, a dark-blue shawl, worn round the 
loins and over the arm in Spanish dancer fashion, and em- 
broidered moccasins. His squaw was a vermilion-faced bun- 
dle of rags not more than four feet high, staggering under buf- 
falo hides, bow and arrows, and papoose. They move every- 
where on horseback, and in the evening withdraw in military 
order, with advance and rear guard, to a camp at some dis- 
tance from the town. 

I enclose some prairie flowers, gathered in my walks round 
the city. Their names are not suited to their beauty; the 
large white one is "the morning blower," the most lovely of 
all, save one, of the , flowers of the Plains. It grows,-with 
many branches, to a height of some eighteen inches, and bears 
from thirty to fifty blooms. The blossoms are open up to a 
little after sunrise, when they close, seldom to open even after 
sunset. It is, therefore, peculiarly the early riser's flower ; 



94 Greater Britain. 

and if it be true that Nature doesn't make things in vain, it 
follows that Nature intended men — or, at all events, some men 
— to get up early, which is a point that I beheve was doubt- 
ful hitherto. 

For the one prairie flower which I think more beautiful 
than the blower I can not find a name. It rises to about six 
inches above ground, and spreads in a circle of a foot across. 
Its leaf is thin and spare ; its flower-bloom a white cup, about 
two inches in diameter, and its buds pink and pendulent. 

All our garden annuals are to be found in masses acres in 
size upon the Plains. Penstemon, coreopsis, persecaria, yucca, 
dwarf sumac, marigold, and sunflower, all are flowering here 
at once, till the country is ablaze with gold and red. The 
coreopsis of our gardens they call the " rosin-weed," and say 
that it forms excellent food for sheep. 

The view of the "Cordillera della Sierra Madre," the 
Rocky Mountain main chain, from the outskirts of Denver, is 
sublime ; that from the roof at Milan does not approach it. 
Twelve miles from the city the mountains rise abruptly from 
the Plains. Piled range above range, with step-like regulari- 
ty, they are topped by a long white line, sharply relieved 
against the indigo color of the sky. Two hundred and fifty 
miles of the mother Sierra are in sight from our veranda ; to 
the south, Pike's Peak and Spanish Peak ; Long's Peak to 
the north — ^Mount Lincoln towering above all. The views are 
limited only by the curvature of the earth, such is the marvel- 
lous purity of the Coloradan air, the effect at once of the dis- 
tance from the sea, and of the bed of limestone which under- 
lies the Plains. 

The site of Denver is heaven-blessed in climate as well as 
loveliness. The sky is brilliantly blue, and cloudless from 
dawn till noon. In the midday heats cloud-making in the 
Sierra begins, and by sunset the snowy chain is multiplied a 
hundred times in curves of white and purple cumuli, while 
thunder rolls heavily along the range. " This is a great coun- 
try, sir," said a Coloradan to me to-day. " We make clouds 
for the whole universe." At dark there is dust or thunder 
storm at the mountain-foot, and then the cold and brilliant 
night. Summer and winter, it is the same. 



Bed India. 95 



CHAPTER XI. 

EED INDIA. 

" These Red Indians are not red," was our first cry, when 
we saw the Utes in the streets of Denver. They had come 
into town to be painted as Enghsh ladies go to London to 
shop ; and we saw them engaged 's^dthin a short time after 
their coming in daubing their cheeks with vermilion and blue, 
and referring to glasses which the squaws admiringly held. 
Still, when we met them with peaceful, paintless checks, we 
had seen that their color was brown, copper, dirt, any thing 
you please except red. 

The Hurons, with whom I had staid at Indian Lorette, 
were French in training if not in blood ; the Pottawatomies 
of St. Mary's Mission, the Delawares of Leavenworth, are 
tame, not wild : it is true that they can hardly be called red. 
But still I had expected to have found these wild prairie and 
mountain Indians of the color from which they take their 
name. Save for paint, I found them of a color wholly differ- 
ent from that which we call red. 

Low in stature, yellow-skinned, small-eyed, and Tartar- 
faced, the Indians of the Plains are a distinct people from the 
tall, hook-nosed warriors of the Eastern States. , It is impos- 
sible to set eyes on their women without being reminded of 
the dwarf skeletons found in the mounds of Missouri and 
Iowa ; but, men or women, the Utes bear no resemblance to 
the bright-eyed, graceful people with whom Penn- traded and 
Standish fought. They are not less inferior in mind than in 
body. It was no Shoshone, no Ute, no Cheyenne who called 
the rainbow the " heaven of flowers," the moon the " night 
queen," or the stars " God's eyes." The Plain tribes are as 
deficient, too, in heroes as in poetry : they have never even 
produced a general, and White Antelope is their nearest aj)- 
proach to a Tecumseh. Their mode of life, the natural feat- 
ures of the country in which they dwell, have nothing in 
them to suggest a reason for their debased condition. The 
reason must lie in the blood, the race. 



96 Greater Britain. 

All who have seen both the Indians and the Polynesians at 
home must have been struck with innumerable resemblances. 
The Maori and Red Indian wakes for the dead are identical ; 
the Californian Indians wear the Maori mat ; the " medicine " 
of the Mandan is but the "tapu" of Polynesia; the New 
Zealand dance-song, the Maori tribal sceptre, were found 
alike by Strachey in Virginia, and Drake in California ; the 
canoes of the West Indies are the same as those of Polynesia. 
Hundreds of arguments, best touched from the farther side 
of the Pacific, concur to prove the Indians a Polynesian race. 
The canoes that brought to Easter Island the people who 
built their mounds and rock temples there, may as easily have 
been carried on by the Chilian breeze and current to the 
South American shore. The wave from Malaya would have 
spent itself upon the Northern plains. The Utes would seem 
to be Kamtchatkians, or men of the Amoor, who, fighting 
their way round by Behring Straits, and then down south, 
drove a wedge between the Polynesians of Appalachia and 
California. No theory but this will account for the sharp 
contrast between the civilization of ancient Peru and Mexico, 
and the degradation in which the Utes have lived from the 
earliest recorded times. Mounds, rock temples, worship, all 
are- alike unknown to the Indians of the Plains ; to the Poly- 
nesian Indians, these were things that had come down to them 
from all time. 

Curious as is the question of the descent of the American 
tribes, it has no bearing on the future of the country, unless 
indeed, in the eyes of those who assert that Delawares and 
Utes, Hurons and Pawnees, are all one race, with features 
modified by soil and climate. If this were so, the handsome, 
rollicking, frank-faced Coloradan " boys " would have to look 
forward to the time when their sons' sons should be as like 
the Utes as many New Englanders of to-day are like the In- 
dians they expelled — that, as the New Englanders are tall, 
taciturn, and hatchet-faced, the Coloradans of the next age 
should be flat-faced warriors five feet high. Confidence in 
the future of America must be founded on a belief in the in- 
destructible vitality of race. 

Kamtchatkians or Polynesians, Malays or sons of the prai- 
ries on which they dwell, the Red Indians have no future. In 



Eed India. 97 

twenty years there will scarcely be one of pure blood alive 
within the United States. 

In La Plata the Indians from the inland forests gradually 
mingle with the Whiter inhabitants of the coast, and become 
indistinguishable from the remainder of the population. In 
Canada and Tahiti the French intermingled with the native 
race : the Hurons are French in every thing but name. In 
Kansas, in Colorado, in N'ew Mexico, miscegenation will never 
be brought about. The pride of race, strong in the English 
everywhere, in America and Australia is an absolute bar to 
intermarriage, and even to lasting connections with the aborig- 
ines. What has happened in Tasmania and Victoria, is hap- 
pening in ISTew Zealand and on the Plains. When you ask a 
Western man his views on the Indian question, he says: 
" Well, sir, we can destroy them by the laws of war, or thin 
'em out by whisky ; but the thinning process is plaguy slow." 

There are a good many Southerners out upon the Plains. 
One of them, describing to me how in Florida they had 
hunted down the Seminoles with blood-hounds, added, " And 
sarved the pesky sarpints right, sah !" South-western volun- 
teers, campaigning against the Indians, have been known to 
hang up in their tents the scalps of the slain, as we English 
used to nail up the skins of the Danes. 

There is in these matters less hypocrisy among the Ameri- 
cans than with ourselves. In 1840 the British Government 
assumed the sovereignty of Kew Zealand in a proclamation 
which set forth with great precision that it did so for the sole 
purpose of protecting the aborigines in the possession of their 
lands. The Maories numbered 200,000 thenj they number 
20,000 now. 

Among the Western men there is no difference of opinion 
on the Indian question. Rifle and revolver are their only 
policy. The ISTew Englanders, who are all for Christianity 
and kindliness in their dealings with the red men, are not simi- 
larly united in one cry. Those who are ignorant of the nature 
of the Indian call out for agricultural employment for the 
braves ; those who know nothing of the Indian's life demand 
that " reserves " be set aside for him, forgetting that no " re- 
serves" can be large enough to hold the buff alo, and that with- 
out the buffalo the red men must plow or starve. 

E 



98 Greater Britain. 

Indian civilization through the means of agriculture is all 
but a total failure. The Shawnees are thriving near Kansas 
City, the Pottawatomies living at St. Mary's Mission, the Dela- 
wares existing at Leavenworth ; but in all these cases there is 
a lara:e infusion of white blood. The Canadian Hurons are 
completely civilized; but then they are completely French. 
If you succeed with an Indian to all appearance, he will sud- 
denly return to his untamed state. An Indian girl, one of the 
most orderly of the pupils at a ladies' school, has been known, 
on feeling herself aggrieved, to withdraw to her room, let 
down her back hair, paint her face, and howl. The same ten- 
dency showed itself in the case of the Delaware chief who 
built himself a white man's house and lived in it thirty years, 
but then suddenly set up his old wigwam in the dining-room in 
disgust. Another bad case is that of the Pawnee who visit- 
ed Buchanan, and behaved so well that when a young En- 
glishman, who came out soon after, told the President that 
he was going West, he gave him a letter to the chief, then 
with his tribe in IsTorthern Kansas. The Pa^vnee read the 
note, offered a pipe, gravely protested eternal friendship, slept 
upon it, and next morning scalped his visitor with his own 
hand. 

The English everywhere attempt to introduce civilization, 
or modify that which exists, in a rough-and-ready manner 
which invariably ends in failure, or in the destruction of the 
native race. A hundred years of absolute rule, mostly peace- 
able, have not, under every advantage, seen the success of our 
repeated attempts to establish trial by jury in Bengiil. For 
twenty years the Maories have mixed with the New Zealand 
colonists on nearly equal terms, have almost universally pro- 
fessed themselves Christians, haA^e attended English schools, 
and learned to speak the English language, to read and write 
their own ; in spite of all this, a few weeks of fanatic outburst 
were enough to reduce almost the whole race to a condition 
of degraded savagery. The Indians of America have within 
the few last years been caught and caged, given acres where 
they once had leagues, and told to plow where once they hunt- 
ed. A pastoral race, with no conception of property in land, 
they have been manufactured into freeholders and tenant 
farmers; Western Ishmaelites, sprung of a race which has 



Eed India. 99 

wandered since its legendary life begins, they have been sub- 
jected to homestead laws and title registration. If our ex- 
periments in New Zealand, in India, on the African coast have 
failed, cautious and costly as they were, there can be no great 
wonder in the unsuccess that has attended the hurried Ameri- 
can experiments. It is not for us, who have the past of Tas- 
mania and the present of Queensland to account for, to do 
more than record the fact that the Americans are not more 
successful with the red men of Kansas than we with the black 
men of Australia. 

The Bosjesman is not a more unpromising subject for civ- 
ilization than the red man ; the Ute is not even gifted with the 
birthright of most savages, the mimetic power. The black 
man in his dress, his farming, his religion, his family life, is 
always trying to imitate the white. In the Indian there is 
none of this : his ancestors roamed over the plains — ^he will 
roam ; his ancestors hunted — ^why should not he hunt ? The 
American savage, like his Asiatic cousins, is conservative ; the 
African changeable, and strong in imitative faculties of the 
mind, just as the Indian is less versatile than the negro, so, 
if it were possible gradually to change his mode of life, slowly 
to bring him to the agricultural state, he would probably be- 
come a skillful and laborious cultivator, and worthy inhabit- 
ant of the Western soil ; as it is, he is exterminated before he 
has time to learn. " Sculp 'em fust, and then talk to 'em," the 
Coloradans say. 

Peace commissioners are yearly sent from Washington to 
treat with hostile tribes upon the Plains. The Indians inva- 
riably continue to fight and rob till winter is at hand; but 
when the snows appear, they send in runners to announce that 
they are prepared to make submission. The commissioners 
appoint a place, and the tribe, their relatives, allies, and friends 
come down thousands strong, and enter upon debates which 
are purposely prolonged till spring. All this time the Indians 
are kept in food and drink; whisky, even, is illegally provided 
them, with the cognisance of the authorities, under the name 
of " hatchets." Blankets and, it is said, powder and revolvers, 
are supplied to them as necessary to their existence on the 
Plains ; but when the first of the spring flowers begin to peep 
up through the snow on the prairies, they take their leave, and 



100 Greater Britain. 

in a few weeks are out again upon the war-path, plundering 
and scalping. 

Judging from English experience in the north, and Spanish 
in Mexico and South America, it would seem as though the 
white man and the red can not exist on the same soil. Step 
by step, the English have driven back the braves, till New En- 
glanders now remember that there were Indians once in Mas- 
sachusetts, as we remember that once there were bears in 
Hampshire. King PhilijD's defeat by the Connecticut Volun- 
teers seems to form part of the earlier legendary history of 
our race ; yet there is still standing, and in good repair, in 
Dorchester, a suburb of Boston, a fi'ame-house which in its 
time has been successfully defended against Red Indians. On 
the other hand, step by step, since the days of Cortez, the In- 
dians and half-bloods have driven out the Spaniards from Mexi- 
co and South America. White men, Spaniards, received Maxi- 
milian at Vera Cruz^ but he was shot by full-blood Indians at 
Queretaro. 

If any attempt is to be made to save the Indians that re- 
main, it must be worked out in the Eastern States. Hitherto 
the whites have but pushed back the Indians westward: if 
they would rescue the remnant from starvation, they must 
bring them East, away from Western men, and Western hunt- 
ing-grounds, and let them intermingle with the whites, living, 
farming along with them, intermarrying if possible. The 
hunting Indian is too costly a being for our age ; but we are 
bound to remember that ours is the blame of having failed to 
teach him to be something better. 

After all, if the Indian is mentally, morally, and physically 
inferior to the white man, it is in every way for the advan- 
tage of the world that the next generation that inhabits Colo- 
rado should consist of whites instead of reds. That this result 
should not be brought about by cruelty or fraud upon the now- 
existing Indians, is all that we need require. The gradual ex- 
tinction of the inferior races is not only a law of nature, but a 
blessing to mankind. 

The Indian question is not likely to be one much longer : 
before I reached England again, I learned that the Coloradan 
capital offered "twenty dollars apiece for the Indian scalps 
with ears on." 



Colorado, 101 



CHAPTER XII. 

COLOEADO; 

Whei^" you have once set eyes upon the never-ending sweep 
of the Great Plains, you no longer wonder that America re- 
jects Malthusianism. As Strachey says of Virginia, " Here is 
ground enough to satisfy the most courteous and wide affec- 
tion." The freedom of these grand countries was worth the 
tremendous conflict in which it was, in reality, the foremost 
question ; their future is of enormous moment to America. 

Travellers soon learn, when making estimates of a country's 
value, to despise no feature of the landscape; that of the 
Plains is full of life, full of charm — ^lonely, indeed, but never 
wearisome. N'ow great rolling uplands of enormous sweep, 
now boundless grassy plains, there is all the grandeur of 
monotony, and yet continual change. Sometimes the grand 
distances are broken by blue buttes or rugged bluffs. Over all 
there is a sparkling atmosphere and never-failing breeze ; the 
air is bracing even when most hot ; the sky is cloudless, and 
no rain falls. A solitude which no words can paint, the bound- 
less prairie swell, conveys an idea of vastness which is the 
overpowering feature of the Plains. 

Maps do not remove the impression produced by views. 
The Arkansas River, which is born and dies within the limit 
of the Plains, is two thousand miles in length, and is naviga- 
ble for eight hundred miles. The Platte and Yellowstone are 
each of them as long. Into the Plains and Plateau you could 
put all India twice. The impression is not merely one of 
size. There is perfect beauty, wondrous fertility, in the lonely 
steppe ; no patriotism, no love of home, can prevent the trav- 
eller wishing here to end his days. 

To those who love the sea, there is here a double charm. 
Not only is the roll of the prairie as grand as that of the 
Atlantic, but the crispness of the wind, the absence of trees, 
the multitude of tiny blooms upon the sod, all conspire to give 
a feeling of nearness to the ocean, the effect of which is we are 



102 Greater Britain. 

always expecting to hail it from off the top of the next hil- 
lock. 

The resemblance to the Tartar plains has been remarked 
by Coloradan writers; it may be traced much farther than 
they have carried it. Not only are the earth, air, and water 
much alike, but in Colorado, as in Bokhara, there are oil-w^ells 
and mud volcanoes. The color of the landscape is, in summer, 
green and flowers ; in fall-time, yellow and flowers, but flowers 
ever. 

The eastern and western portions of the Plains are not 
alike. In Kansas the grass is tall and rank ; the ravines are 
filled with Cottonwood, hickory, and black walnut ; here and 
there are square miles of sunflowers from seven to nine feet 
high. As we came west, we found that the sunflowers dwin- 
dled, and at Denver they are only from three to nine inches 
in height, the oddest little plants in nature, but thorough sun- 
flowers, for all their smallness. We found the buffalo in the 
eastern plains in the long bunch-grass, but in the winter they 
work to the west in search of the sweet, juicy "blue grass," 
which they rub out from under the snow in the Coloradan 
plains. This grass is so short that, as the story goes, you 
must lather it before you can mow it. The " blue grass " has 
high vitaHty : if a wagon-train is camped for a single night 
among the sunflowers or tall weeds, this crisp turf at once 
springs up, and holds the ground forever. 

The most astounding feature of these plains is their capac- 
ity to receive millions, and, swaUowing them up, to wait open- 
mouthed for more. Vast and silent, fertile, yet waste, field- 
like, yet untilled, they have room for the Huns, the Goths, the 
Vandals, for all the teeming multitudes that have poured and 
can pour from the plains of Asia and of Central Europe. 
Twice as large as Hindostan,more temperate, more habitable, 
nature has been placed here hedgeless, gateless, free to all — a 
green field for the support of half the human race, unclaimed, 
untouched, awaiting smiling, hands and plow. 

There are two curses upon this land. Here, as in India, 
the rivers depend on the melting of distant snows for their 
supplies, and in the hot weather are represented by beds of 
parched white sand. So hot and dry is a great portion of the 
land that crops require irrigation. Water for drinking pur- 



Colorado. 103 

poses is scarce ; artesian bores succeed, but they are somewhat 
costly for the Coloradan purse, and the supply from common 
wells is brackish. This, perhaps, may in part account for the 
Western mode of " prospecting " after water, under which it 
is agreed that if none be found at ten feet, a trial shall be 
made at a fresh spot. The thriftless ranchman had sooner 
find bad water at nine feet than good at eleven. 

Irrigation by means of dams and reservoirs, such as those 
we are building in Victoria, is but a question of cost and 
time. The never-failing breezes of the Plains may be utilized 
for water-raising, and with water all is possible. Even in the 
mountain plateau, overspread as it is with soda, it has been 
found, as it has been by French farmers in Algeria, that, under 
irrigation, the more alkali the better corn-crop. 

When fires are held in check by special enactments, such 
as those which have been passed in Victoria and South Aus- 
tralia, and the waters of the winter streams retained for sum- 
mer use by tanks and dams ; when artesian wells are frequent 
and irrigation general, belts of timber will become possible 
upon the Plains. Once planted, these will in their turn miti- 
gate the extremes of climate, and keep alike in check the 
forces of evaporation, sun, and wind. Cultivation itself brings 
rain, and steam wiU soon be available for pumping water out 
of wells, for there is a great natural store of brown coal and 
of oil-bearing shale near Denver, so that all would be well were 
it not for the locusts — the scourge of the Plains — the second 
curse. The coming of the chirping hordes is a real calamity 
in these far-western countries. Their departure, whenever it 
occurs, is officially announced by the governor of the State. 

I have seen a field of Indian corn stripped bare of every 
leaf and cob by the crickets ; but the owner told me that he 
found consolation in the fact that they ate up the weeds as 
well. For the locusts there is no cure. The plovers may eat 
a few billions, but, as a rule, Coloradans must learn to expect 
that the locusts will increase with the increase of the crops on 
which they feed. The more corn, the more locusts — the more 
plovers, perhaps ; a clear gain to the locusts and plovers, but 
a dead loss to the farmers and ranchmen. 

The Coloradan " boys " are a handsome, intelligent race. 
The mixture of Celtic and Saxon blood has here produced a gen- 



104 Greater Britain. 

erous and noble manhood ; and the freedom from wood, and con- 
sequent exj^osure to wind and rain, has exterminated ague, 
and driven away the hatchet-face ; but for all this, the Colora- 
dans may have to succumb to the locusts. At present they af- 
fect to despise them. " How may you get on in Colorado ?" 
said a Missourian one day to a " boy " that was up at St. Louis. 
" Purty well, guess, if 'it warn't for the insects." " What in- 
sects ? Crickets?" "Crickets! Wall, guess not — jess in- 
sects like : rattlesnakes, panther, bar, catamount, and sichlike." 

" The march of emj)ire stopped by a grasshopper " would 
be a good heading for a Denver paper, but would not repre- 
sent a fact. The locusts may alter the step, but not cause a 
halt. If corn is impossible, cattle are not ; already thousands 
are pastured round Denver on the natural grass. For horses, 
for merino sheep, these roUing table-lands are peculiarly adapt- 
ed. The New Zealand paddock system may be applied to the 
whole of this vast region — Dutch clover, French lucern, could 
replace the Indian grasses, and four sheep to the acre would 
seem no extravagant estimate of the carrying capability of the 
lands. The world must come here for its tallow, its wool, its 
hides, its food. 

In this seemingly happy conclusion there lurks a danger. 
Flocks and herds are the main props of great farming, the 
natural supporters of an aristocracy. Cattle-breeding is incon- 
sistent, if not with republicanism, at least with pure democra- 
cy. There are dangerous classes of two kinds — those who 
have too many acres, as well as those who have too few. , The 
danger at least is real. Nothing short of violence or special 
legislation can prevent the Plains from continuing to be for- 
ever that which under nature's farming they have ever been — 
the feeding-ground for mighty flocks, the cattle-pasture of. the 
world. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 



" What will I do for you if you stop here among us ? 
Why, I'll name that peak after you in the next survey," said 
Governor Gilpin, pointing to a snowy mountain towering to 



EocKY Mountains. 105 

its 15,000 feet in the direction of Mount Lincoln. I was not 
to be tempted, however ; and as for Dixon, there is ah'eady a 
county named after him in IsTebraska : so off we went along 
the foot of the hills on our road to the Great Salt Lake, fol- 
lowing the " Cherokee Trail." 

Striking north from Denver by Yasquez Fork and Cache 
la Poudre — called " Cash le Powder," just as Mount Royal has 
become Montreal, and Sault de St. Marie, Soo — we entered the 
Black Mountains, or Eastern Foot-hills, at Beaver Creek. On 
the second day, at two in the afternoon, we reached Virginia 
Dale for breakfast without adventure, unless it were the shoot- 
ing of a monster rattlesnake that lay " coiled in our path upon 
the mountain-side." Had we been but a few minutes later, 
we should have made it a halt for " supper " instead of break- 
fast, as the drivers had but these two names for our daily 
meals at whatever hour they took place. Our " breakfasts " 
varied from 3.30 a.m. to 2 p.m. ; our suppers, from 3 p.m. to 

2 A.M. 

Here we found the weird red rocks that give to the river 
and the territory their namie of Colorado, and came upon the 
mountain plateau at the spot where last year the Utes scalped 
seven men only three hours after Speaker Colfax and a Con- 
gressional party had passed with their escort. 

"While trundling over the sandy wastes of Laramie Plains, 
we sighted the "Wind River chain, drawn by Bierstadt in his 
great picture of the " Rocky Mountains." The painter has 
caught the forms, but missed the atmosphere of the range : the 
clouds and mists are those of Maine and Massachusetts ; there 
is color more vivid, darkness more lurid, in the storms of Col- 
orado. 

This was our first sight of the main range since we entered 
the Black Hills, although we passed through the gorges at the 
very foot of Long's Peak. It was not till we had reached the 
rolling hills of " Meridian Bow " — a hundred miles beyond the 
peak — that we once more caught sight of it shining in the rear. 

In the night between the second and third days the frost 
was so bitter, at the great altitude to which we had attained, 
that we resorted to every expedient to keep out the cold. 
While I was trying to peg down one of the leathern flaps 
of our ambulance with the pencil from my note-book, my eye 

Ee 



106 Greater Britain. 

caught the moonlight on the ground, and I drcAV back saying, 
"We are on the snow." The next time we halted I found 
that what I had seen was an impalpable white dust, the much- 
dreaded alkali. 

In the morning of the third day we found ourselves in a 
country of dazzling white, dotted with here and there a tuft 
of sage-brush — an artemisia akin to that of the Algerian high- 
lands. At last we were in the " American Desert " — the " Mau- 
vaises terres.'''' 

Once only did we escape for a time from alkali and sage to 
sweet waters and sweet grass. Near Bridger's Pass and the 
" divide " between Atlantic and Pacific floods, we came on a 
long valley swept by chilly breezes, and almost unfit for human 
habitation, from the rarefaction of the air, but blessed with 
pasture-ground on which domesticated herds of Himalayan 
yak should one day feed. Settlers in Utah will find out that 
this animal, which would flourish here at altitudes of from 
4000 to 14,000 feet, and which bears the most useful of all furs, 
requires less herbage in proportion- to its weight and size than 
almost any animal we know. 

This Bridger's Pass route is that by which the telegraph 
line runs, and I was told by the drivers strange stories of the 
Indians and their views on this great Medicine. They never 
destroy out of mere wantonness, but have been known to cut 
the wire and then lie in ambush in the neighborhood, in the 
expectation that repairing parties would arrive and fall an easy 
prey. Having come one morning upon three armed overland- 
ers lying fast asleep, while a fourth kept guard, by afire which 
coincided with a gap in the posts, but which was far from 
any timber or even scrub, I have my doubts as to whether 
" white Indians " have not much to do with the destruction of 
the line. 

From one of the uplands of the artemisia barrens we sight- 
ed at once Fremont's Peak on the north, and another great 
snow-dome upon the south. The unknown mountain was both 
the more distant and the loftier of the two, yet the maps mark 
no chain within eyeshot to the southward. The country on 
either side of this well-worn track is still as little known 
as when Captain Stansbury explored it in 1850; and when 
we crossed the Green River, as the Upper Colorado is called, 



Rocky Mountains. 107 

it was strange to remember that the stream is here lost in a 
thousand miles of midiscovered wilds, to be found again flow- 
ing toward Mexico. Near the ferry is the place where Albert 
S. Johnston's mule-trains were captured by the Mormons under 
Lot Smith. 

In the middle of the night we would come sometimes upon 
mule-trains starting on their march in order to avoid the mid- 
day sun, and thus save water, which they are sometimes forced 
to carry with them for as much as fifty miles. When we 
found them halted, they were always camped on bluffs and in 
bends, far from rocks and tufts, behind which the Indians 
might creep and stampede the cattle : this they do by suddenly 
swooping down with fearful noises, and riding among the 
mules or oxen at full speed. The beasts break away in their 
fright, and are driven of£ before the sentries have time to turn 
out the camp. 

On the fourth day from Denver the scenery was tame 
enough, but strange in the extreme. Its characteristic feat- 
ure was its breadth. No longer the rocky defiles of Virginia 
Dale, no longer the glimpses of the main range as from Lara- 
mie Plains and the foot-hills of Meridian Bow, but great roll- 
ing downs like those of the Plains much magnified. We 
crossed one of the highest passes in the world without seeing 
snow, but looked back directly we were through it on snow- 
fields behind us and all around. 

At Elk Mountain we suffered greatly from the frost, but by 
midday we were taking off our coats, and the mules hanging 
their heads in the sun once more, while those which should 
have taken their places were, as the ranchman expressed it, 
" kicking their heels in pure cussedness " at a stream some ten 
miles away. 

While walking before the " hack " through the burning 
sand of Bitter Creek, I put up a bird as big as a turkey, which 
must, I suppose, have been a vulture. The sage-brush grow- 
ing here as much as three feet high, and as stout and gnarled 
as century-old heather, gave shelter to a few coveys of sage- 
hens, at which we shot without much success, although they 
seldom ran, and never rose. Their color is that of the brush 
itself — a yellowish-gray ; — and it is as hard to see them as to 
pick up a partridge on a sun-diied fallow at home in England. 



108 Geeater Britain. 

Of wolves and rattlesnakes there were plenty, but of big game 
we saw but little, only a few black-tails in the day. 

This track is more travelled by trains than is the Smoky 
Hill route, which accounts for the absence of game on the 
Une ; but that there is plenty about close at hand is clear from 
the way we were fed. Smoky Hill route starvation was for- 
gotten in piles of steaks of elk and antelope ; but still no fruit, 
no vegetable, no bread, no drink save " sage-brush tea," and 
that half poisoned with the water of the alkaline creeks. 

Jerked buffalo had disappeared from our meals. The 
droves never visit the Sierra Madre now, and scientific books 
have said that in the mountains they were ever unknown. In 
Bridger's Pass we saw the skulls of not less than twenty buf- 
falo, which is proof enough that they once were here, though 
perhaps long ago. The skin and bones will last about a year 
after the beast has died, for the wolves tear them to pieces to 
get at the marrow within, but the skull they never touch ; 
and the oldest ranchman failed to give me an answer as to 
how long skulls and horns might last. We saw no buffalo 
roads like those across the Plains. 

From the absence of buffalo, absence of birds, absence of 
flowers, absence even of Indians, the Rocky Mountain plateau 
is more of a solitude than are the Plains. It takes days to 
see this, for you naturally notice it less. On the Plains, the 
glorious climate, the masses of rich blooming plants, the mil- 
lions of beasts, and insects, and birds, all seem prepared to the 
hand of man, and for man you are continually searching. 
Each time you round a hill you look for the smoke of the 
farm. Here on the mountains you feel as you do on the sea : 
it is nature's own lone solitude, but fi'om no fault of ours — 
the higher parts of the plateau were not made for man. 

Early on the fifth night we dashed suddenly out of utter 
darkness into a mountain glen blazing with fifty fires, and per- 
fumed with the scent of burning cedar. As many wagons as 
there were fires were corralled in an ellipse about the road, and 
600 cattle were 23 astured within the fire-glow in rich grass that 
told of water. Men and women were seated round the camp- 
fires, praying and singing hymns. As we drove in they rose 
and cheered us " on your way to Zion." Our Gentile driver 
yelled back the war-whoop " How ! How ! How ! How — w ! 



Rocky Mountains. 109 

We'll give yer love to Brigham ;" and back went the poor 
travellers to their prayers again. It was a bull-train of the 
Mormon immigration. 

Five minutes after we had passed the camp we were back 
in civilization, and plunged into polygamous society all at once, 
with Bishop Myers, the keeper of l^ear River ranch, drawing 
water from the well, while Mrs. Myers ISTo. 1 cooked the chops, 
and Mrs. Myers 'No, 2 laid the table neatly. 

The kind bishop made us sit before the fire till we were 
warm, and filled our "hack" with hay that we might con- 
tinue so, and oft we went, inclined to look favorably on polyg- 
amy after such experience of polygamists. 

Leaving Bear River about midnight, at two o'clock in the 
morning of the sixth day we commenced the descent of Echo 
Canon, the grandest of all the gully passes of the Wasatch 
range. The night was so clear that I was able to make 
some outline sketches of the cliffs from the ranch where we 
changed mules. Echo Canon is the Thermopylae of Utah, 
the pass that the Mormons fortified against the United States 
forces under Albert S. Johnston at the time of " Buchanan's 
raid." Twenty-six miles long, often not more than a few yards 
wide at the bottom, and a few hundred feet at the top, with an 
overhanging cliff on the north side, and a mountain wall on 
the south. Echo Canon would be no easy pass to force. Gov- 
ernment will do well to prevent the Pacific Railroad from fol- 
lowing this defile. 

After breakfast at Coalville, the Mormon Newcastle, situ- 
ated in a smiling valley not unlike that between Martigny and 
Saint Maurice, we dashed on past Kimball's ranch, where we 
once more hitched horses instead of mules, and began our de- 
scent of seventeen miles down Big Canon, the best of all the 
passes of the Wasatch. Rounding a spur at the end of our 
six hundredth mile from Denver, we first sighted the Mormon 
promised land. 

The sun was setting over the great dead lake to our right, 
lighting up the vaUey with a silvery gleam from Jordan River, 
and the hills with a golden glow from off the snow-fields of 
the many mountain chains and peaks around. In our front, 
the Oquirrh, or Western range, stood out in sharp purple out- 
lines upon a sea-colored sky. To our left were the Utah 



110 Greater Britain. 

Mountains, blusliing rose, all about our heads tlie Wasatch 
glowing in orange and gold. From the flat valley in the 
snowy distance rose the smoke of many houses, the dust of 
many droves ; on the bench-land of Ensign Peak, on the lake 
side, white houses peeped from among the trees modestly, 
and hinted the presence of the city. 

Here was Plato's table-land of the Atlantic isle — one great 
field of corn and wheat, where only twenty years ago Fre- 
mont, the Pathfinder, reported wheat and corn impossible. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

RRIGHAM YOUNG 



" I LOOK upon Mohammed and Brigham as the very best 
men that God could send as ministers to those unto whom He 
sent them," wrote Elder Frederick Evans, of the " Shaker " 
village of ]N"ew Lebanon, in a letter to us, inclosing another 
by way of introduction to the Mormon President. 

Credentials from the Shaker to the Mormon chief — from 
the great living exponent of the principle of celibacy to the 
" most married man " in all America — were not to be kept 
undelivered ; so the moment we had taken a bath, we posted 
off to a merchant to whom we had letters, that we might in- 
quire when his spiritual chief and military ruler would be 
home again from his " trip north." The answer was, " To- 



morrow." 



After watching the last gleams fade fi*om the snow-fields 
upon the Wasatch, we parted for the night, as I had to sleep 
m a private house, the hotel being filled even to the balcony. 
As I entered the drawing-room of my entertainer, I heard the 
voice of a lady reading, and caught enough of what she said 
to be aware that it was a defense of polygamy. She ceased 
when she saw the stranger ; but I found that it was my host's 
first wife reading Belinda Pratt's book to her daughters — 
girls just blooming into womanhood. 

After an agreeable chat with the ladies, doubly pleasant as 
it followed upon a long absence from civilization, I went to 
my room, which I afterward found to be that of the eldest 



Brigham Young. Ill 

son, a youth of sixteen years. In one corner stood two Bal- 
lard rifles, and two revolvers and a militia uniform hung from 
pegs upon the wall. When I lay down with my hands under- 
neath the pillow — an attitude instinctively adopted to escape 
the sand-flies, I touched something cold. I felt it — a full-sized 
Colt, and capped. Such was my first introduction to Utah 
Mormonism. 

On the morrow we had the first and most formal of our 
four interviews with the Mormon President, the conversation 
lasting three hours, and all the leading men of the Church be- 
ing present. When we rose to leave, Brigham said, " Come 
to see me here again : Brother Stenhouse will show you every 
thing ;" and then blessed us in these words : " Peace be with 
you, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ." 

Elder Stenhouse followed us out of the presence, and some- 
what anxiously put the odd question, " Well, is he a white 
man?" "White" is used in Utah as a general term of 
praise : a white man is a man — to use our corresponding idiom 
— ^not so black as he is painted. A " white country " is a coun- 
try with grass and trees ; just as a white man means a man 
who is morally not a Ute, so a white country is a land in 
which others than Utes can dwell. 

We made some complimentary answer to Stenhouse's ques- 
tion: but it was impossible not to feel that the real point was, 
Is Brigham sincere ? 

Brigham's deeds have been those of a sincere man. His 
bitterest opponents cannot dispute the fact that in 1844, when 
Nauvoo was about to be deserted, owing to the attacks of a 
ruffianly mob, Brigham rushed to the front, and took the 
chief command. To be a Mormon leader then was to be a 
leader of an outcast people, with a price set on his head, in a 
Missourian county in which almost every man who was not a 
Mormon was by profession an assassin. In the sense, too, of 
believing that he is what he professes to be, Brigham is un- 
doubtedly sincere. In the wider sense of being that which 
he professes to be he comes ofE as well, if only we will read 
his words in the way he speaks them. He tells us that he is 
a prophet — God's representative on earth ; but when I asked 
him whether he was of a wholly different spiritual rank to 
that held by other devout men, he said, " By no means. I am 



112 Greater Britain. 

a prophet — one of many. All good men are prophets ; but 
God has blessed me with peculiar favor in revealing His will 
oftener and more clearly through me than through other 
men." 

Those who would understand Brigham's revelations must 
read Bentham. The leading Mormons are utilitarian deists. 
" God's will be done," they, like other deists, say is to be our 
rule ; and God's will they find in written Revelation and in 
Utility. God has given men, by the actual hand of angels, 
the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Book of Covenants, the 
revelation upon Plural Marriage. When these are exhausted, 
man, seeking for God's will, has to turn to the principle of 
Utility : that which is for the happiness of mankind — that is, 
of the Church — is God's will, and must be done. While 
Utility is their only index to God's pleasure, they admit that 
the Church must be ruled — that opinions may differ as to 
what is the good of the Church, and therefore the will of 
God. They meet, then, annually, in an assembly of the peo- 
ple, and electing Church officers by popular will and acclama- 
tion, they see God's finger in the ballot-box. They say, like 
the Jews in the election of their judges, that the choice of the 
people is the choice of God. This is what men like John 
Taylor or Daniel Wells appear to feel ; the ignorant are per- 
mitted to look upon Brigham as something more than man, and 
though Brigham himself does nothing to confirm this view, 
the leaders foster the delusion. When I asked Stenhouse, " Has 
Brigham's re-election as Prophet ever been opposed ?" he an- 
swered sharply, " I should like to see the man who'd do it." 

Brigham's personal position is a strange one : he calls him- 
self Prophet, declares that he has revelations from God him- 
self ; but when you ask him quietly what all this means, you 
find that for Prophet you should read Pohtical Philosopher. 
He sees that a canal from Utah Lake to Salt Lake Valley 
would be of vast utility to the Church and people — that a new 
settlement is urgently required. He thinks about these things 
till they dominate in his mind — take in his brain the shape of 
physical creations. He dreams of the canal, the city — sees 
them before him in his waking moments. That which is so 
clearly for the good of God's people becomes God's will. 
Next Sunday at the Tabernacle he steps to the front and says, 



Brigham Young. 113 

" God has spoken : He has said unto his Prophet, * Get thee, 
lip, Brigham, and build Me a city in the fertile valley to the 
South, where there is water, where there are fish, where the 
sun is strong enough to ripen the cotton-plants, and give rai- 
ment as well as food to My saints on earth.' Brethren willing 
to aid God's work should come to me before the bishops' 
meeting." As the Prophet takes his seat again and puts on 
his broad-brimmed hat, a hum of applause runs round the 
Bowery, and teams and barrows are freely promised. 

Sometimes the canal, the bridge, the city may prove a fail- 
ure, but this is not concealed : the Prophet's human tongue 
may blunder even when he is communicating holy things. 

" After all," Brigham said to me the day before I left, " the 
highest inspiration is good sense — the knowing what to do, 
and how to do it." 

In all this it is hard for us, with our English hatred of 
casuistry and hair-splitting, to see sincerity ; still, given his 
foundation, Brigham is sincere. Like other political religion- 
ists, he must feel himself morally bound to stick at nothing 
when the interests of the Church are at stake. To prefer 
man's life or property to the service of God must be a crime 
in such a Church. The Mormons deny the truth of the mur- 
der-stories alleged against the Danites, but they avoid doing 
so in sweeping or even general terms — though if need were, 
of course they would be bound to lie as well as to kill in the 
name of God and His holy Prophet. 

The secret policy which I have sketched gives, evidently, 
enormous power to some one man within the Church ; but the 
Mormon Constitution does not very clearly point out who 
that man shall be. With a view to the possible future failure 
of leaders of great personal qualifications, the first Presidency 
consists of three members with equal rank ; but to his place 
in the Trinity Brigham unites the office of Trustee in Trust, 
which gives him the control of the funds and tithing, or Church 
taxation. 

All are not agreed as to what should be Brigham's place 
in Utah. Stenhouse said one day, " I am one of those who 
think that our President should do every thing. He has 
made this Church and this country, and should have his way 
•in all things; saying so gets me into trouble with some." 



114 Geeater Britaik. 

The writer of a report of Brigham's tour which appeared in 
the Salt Lake Telegraph the day we reached the city, used 
the words, " God never spoke through man more clearly than 
through President Young." 

One day, when Stenhouse was speaking of the morality of the 
Mormon people, he said, " Our penalty for adultery is death." 
Remembering the Danites, we were down on him at once : 
"Do you inflict it ?" " No ; but — well, not practically ; but 
really it is so. A man who commits adultery withers away 
and perishes. A man sent away from his wives upon a mis- 
sion that may last for years, if he lives not purely — if, when 
he returns, he can not meet the eye of JBrighapi, better for him 
to he at once in hell. He withers." 

Brigham himself has spoken in strong words of his own 
power over the Mormon people : " Let the talking-folk .at 
Washington say, if they please, that I am no longer Governor 
of Utah. I am, and will be, governor until God Almighty 
says, ' Brigham, you need not be governor any more.' " 

Brigham's head is that of a man who nowhere could be 
second. 



CHAPTER XV, 

MOEMONDOM. 

We had been presented at court, and favorably received; 
asked to call again ; admitted to State secrets of the presidency. 
From this moment our position in the city was secured. 
Mormon seats in the theatre were placed at our disposal ; the 
director of immigration, the presiding bishop. Colonel Hunter 
— a grim, weather-beaten Indian-fighter — and his coadjutors 
carried us off to see the reception of the bull-train at the El- 
ephant Corral ; we were offered a team to take us to the 
Lake, which we refused only because we had already accepted 
the loan of one from a Gentile merchant ; presents of peaches 
and invitations to lunch, dinner, and supper came pouring in 
upon us from all sides. Li a single morning we were visited 
by four of the Apostles and nine other leading members of 
the Church. Ecclesiastical dignitaries sat upon our single 
chair and wash-hand-stand ; and one bed groaned under the* 



MORMONDOM. 115 

weight of George A. Smith, "Church historian," while the 
other bore, ^sop's load — the peaches he had brought. 
These growers of fruit from, standard trees think but small 
things of our English wall fruit, "baked on one side and 
frozen on the other," as they say. There is a mellowness about 
the Mormon peaches that would drive our gardeners to despair. 

One of our callers was Captain Hooper, the Utah delegate 
to Congress. He is an adept at the Western plan of getting 
out of a fix by telling you a story. When we laughingly al- 
luded to his lack of wives, and the absurdity of a monogamist 
representing Utah, he said that the people at Washington all 
beheved that Utah had sent them a polygamist. There is a 
rule that no one with the entry shall take with him more 
than one lady to the White House receptions. A member of 
Congress was urged by three ladies to take them ^vith him. 
He, as men do, said, " The thing is impossible," and did it. 
Presenting himself with the bevy at the door, the usher stop- 
ped him : " Can't pass ; only one friend admitted with each 
member." " Suppose, sir, that I'm the delegate from Utah 
Territory ?" said the Congressman. " Oh, pass in, sir, pass 
in," was the instant answer of the usher. The story reminds 
me of poor BroAvne's (Artemus Ward) "family" ticket to 
his lecture at Salt Lake City : " Admit the bearer and 07ie 
wife." Hooper is said to be under pressure at this moment 
on the question of polygamy, for he is a favorite with the 
Prophet, who can not, however, with consistency promote him 
to office in the Church on account of a saying of his own, " A 
man with one wife is of less account before God than a man 
with no wives at all." 

Our best opportunity of judging of the Mormon ladies was 
at the theatre, which we attended regularly, sitting now in 
Elder Stenhouse's " family " seats, now with General Wells. 
Here we saw all the wives of the leading Churchmen of the 
city ; in their houses we saw only those they chose to show us : 
in no case but that of the Clawson family did we meet in society 
all the wives. We noticed at once that the leading ladies were 
all alike — full of taste, full of sense, but full at the same time of 
a kind of unconscious melancholy. Everywhere as you looked 
round the house, you met the sad eye which I had seen but 
once before — among the Shakers at New Lebanon. The 



116 Greater Britain. 

women here, knowing no other state, seem to think themselves 
as happy as the day is long : their eye alone is there to show 
the Gentile that they are, if the expression may be aUowed, 
unhappy without knowing it. That these Mormon women 
love their religion and reverence its priests is but a conse- 
quence of its being " their religion" — the system in the midst 
of which they have been brought up. Which of us is there 
who does not set up some idol in his heart round which he 
weaves all that he has of poetry and devotion in his character. 
Art, hero-worship, patriotism are forms of this great tendency. 
That the Mormon girls, who are educated as highly as those 
of any country in the world — who, like all American girls, are 
allowed to wander where they please — who are certain of 
protection in any of the fifty Gentile houses in the city, and 
absolutely safe in Camp Douglas at the distance of two miles 
from the city wall — all consent deliberately to enter on polyg- 
amy — -shows clearly enough that they can, as a rule, have no 
dislike to it beyond such a feeling as public opinion will speed- 
ily overcome. 

Discussion of t^e institution of plural marriage in Salt Lake 
City is fruitless ; all that can be done is to observe. In assault- 
ing the Mormon citadel, you strike against the air. " Polyg- 
amy degrades the woman," you begin. " Morally or social- 
ly ?" says the Mormon. " Socially." " Granted," is the reply, 
"and that is a most desirable consummation. By socially 
lowering, it morally raises the woman. It makes her a serv- 
ant, but it makes her pure and good." 

It is always well to remember that if we have one argument 
against polygamy which from our Gentile point of view is un- 
answerable, it is not necessary that we should rack our brains 
for others. All our modern experience is favorable to rank- 
ing women as man's equal ; polygamy assumes that she shall 
be his servant — loving, faithful, cheerful, willing, but still a 
servant. 

The opposite poles upon the woman question are Utah 
polygamy and Kansas female suffrage. 



Western Editors. 117 



CHAPTER XVI. 

WESTERN EDITORS. 

The attack upon Mormondom has been systematized, and 
is conducted with military skill, by trench and parallel. The 
New England papers having called for " facts " whereon to 
base their homilies, General Connor, of Fenian fame, set up 
the Union 'Vedette in Salt Lake City, and publishes on Satur- 
days a sheet expressly intended for Eastern reading. The 
mantle of the Sayigarao JTournal has fallen on the Vedette^ 
and John C. Bennett is effaced by Connor. From this source 
it is that come the whole of the paragraphs against Brigham 
and Mormondom which appear in the Eastern papers, and 
find their way to London. The editor has to fill his paper 
with peppery leaders, well-spiced telegrams, stinging " facts." 
Every week there must be something that can be used and 
quoted against Brigham. The Eastern remarks upon quo- 
tations in turn are quoted at Salt Lake. Under such circum- 
stances, even telegrams can be made to take a flavor. In to- 
day's Yedette we have one from St. Joseph, describing how 
above one thousand " of these dirty, filthy dupes of Great Salt 
Lake iniquity " are now squatting round the packet depot 
awaiting transport. Another from Chicago tells us that the 
seven thousand European Mormons who have this year passed 
up the Missouri River " are of the lowest and most ignorant 
classes." The leader is directed against Mormons in gener- 
al, and Stenhouse in particular, as editor of one of the Mor- 
mon papers, and ex-postmaster of the Territory. He has al- 
ready had cause to fear the Yedette^ as it was through the 
exertions of its editor that he lost his office. This matter is 
referred to in the leader of to-day : " When we found our 
letters scattered about the streets in fragments, we succeeded 
in getting an honest postmatter appointed in place of the ed- 
itor of the Telegraph " — " an organ where even carrots, pump- 
kins, and potatoes are current funds " — " directed by a clique 
of foreign writers, who can hardly speak our language, and 



118 Greater Britain. 

who never drew a loyal breath smce they came to Utah." 
The Mormon tax frauds and the Mormon police likewise come 
in for their share of abuse, and the writer concludes with a 
pathetic plea against arrest " for quietly indulging in a glass 
of wine in a private room with a friend." 

Attacks such as these make one understand the suspicious- 
ness of the Mormon leaders, and the slowness of Stenhouse 
and his friends to take a joke if it concerns the Church. 
Poor Artemus "Ward once wrote to Stenhouse, " Ef you can't 
take a joke, you'll be darned, and you oughter ;" but the jest 
at which he can laugh has wrought no cure. Heber Kimball 

said to me one day, " They're all alike. There was came 

here to write a book, and we thought better of him than of 
most. I showed him more kindness than I ever showed a 
man before or since, and then he called me a ' hoary repro- 
bate.' I would advise him not to pass this way next time." 

The suspicion often takes odd shapes. One Sunday morn- 
ing at the Tabernacle I remarked that the Prophet's daugh- 
ter, Zina, had on the same dress she had worn the evening 
before at the theatre in playing " Mrs. Musket," in the farce 
of " My Husband's Ghost." It was a black silk gown, with a 
Vandyke flounce of white, impossible to mistake. I pointed 
it out in joke to a Mormon friend, when he denied my asser- 
tion in the most emphatic way, although he could not have 
known for certain that I was wrong, as he sat next to me in 
the theatre during the whole play. 

The Mormons will talk freely of their own suspiciousness. 
They say that the coldness with which travellers are usually 
received at Salt Lake City is the consequence of years of total 
misrepresentation. They forget that they are arguing in a cir- 
cle, and that this misrepresentation is itself sometimes the re- 
sult of their reserve. 

The news and advertisements are even more amusing than 
the leaders in the Vedette. A paragraph tells us, for instance, 
that " Mrs. Martha Stewart and Mrs. Robertson, of San An- 
toine, lately had an impromptu fight with revolvers ; Mrs. 
Stewart was badly winged." N"-«r is this the only reference 
in the paper to shooting by ladies, as another paragraph tells 
how a young girl, frightened by a sham ghost, drew on the 
would-be apparition, and with six barrels shot him twice 



Westekn Editors. 119 

through the head, and four times " in the region of the heart." 
A quotation from the Oioyhee Avalanche, speaking of gam- 
bling-hells, tells us that " one hurdy shebang " in Silver City 
shipped 8000 dollars, as the net proceeds of its July business. 
" These leeches corral more clear cash than most quartz-mills," 
remonstrates the editor. " Corral," in this sense, is the Mex- 
ican cattle inclosure ; the yard where the team - mules are 
ranched ; the Jcraal of Cape Colony, which, on the Plains and 
the Plateau, serves as a fort for men as well as a fold for 
oxen, and resembles the serai of the East. The word "to 
corral " means to turn into one of these pens ; and thence 
" to pouch," " to pocket," " to bag," to get well into hand. 

The advertisements are in keeping with the news. "Every 
thing, from a salamander safe to a Limerick fish-hook," is of- 
fered by one firm. "Fifty-three and a half and three and 
three-quarter thimble-skein Schuttler wagons," is offered by an- 
other. Again, an advertiser bids us " Spike the Guns of Hum- 
bug ! and Beware of Deleterious Dyes ! Refuse to have your 
Heads Baptized with Liquid Fire !" Another says, "If you 
want a paper free from entanglements of cliques., and antagonis- 
tic to the corrupting evils of f actionism, subscribe to the Mon- 
tana Radiator.'''' But nothing beats the following : " Butcher's 
Dead-shot for Bed-bugs ! Curls them up as fire does a leaf ! 
Try it, and sleep in peace ! Sold by all live druggists." 

If we turn, however, to the other Salt Lake papers, the Tel- 
egraph, an independent Mormon paper, and the Deseret News, 
the official journal of the Church, we find a contrast to the 
trash of the Yedette. Brigham's paper, clearly printed and of 
a pleasant size, is fiUed with the best and latest news from the 
outlying portions of the Territory and from Europe. The 
motto on its head is a simple one — " Truth and Liberty," and 
twenty-eight columns of solid news are given us. Among the 
items is an account of a fight upon the Smoky Hill route, 
which occurred on the day we reached this city, and in which 
two teamsters — George Hill and Luke West — were killed by 
the Kiowas and Cheyennes. A loyal Union article from the 
pen of Albert Carrington, the editor, is followed by one upon 
the natural advantages of Utah, in which the writer complains 
that the very men who ridiculed the Mormons for settling in 
a desert are now declaiming against their being allowed to 



120 Greater Britain. 

squat upon one of the " most fertile locations in the United 
States." The same paper asserts that Mormon success is se- 
cured only by Mormon industry, and that as a merely com- 
mercial speculation, apart from the religious impulse, the culti- 
vation of Utah would not pay : " Utah is no place for the loaf- 
er or the lazy man." An official report, like the Court Circu- 
lar of England, is headed, " President Brigham Young's trip 
North," and is signed by G. D. Watt, " Reporter " to the 
Church. The Old Testament is not spared. " From what we 
saw of the timbered mountains," writes one reporter, " we had 
no despondency of Israel ever failing for material to build up, 
beautify, and adorn pleasant habitations in that part of Zion." 
A theatrical criticism is not wanting, and the Church actors 
come in for " praise all around." In another part of the paper 
are telegraphic reports from the captains of the seven immi- 
grant trains not yet come in, giving their position, and details 
of the number of days' march for which they have provisions 
still in hand. One reports " thirty-eight head of cattle stolen ;" 
another, " a good deal of mountain fever ;" but, on the whole, 
the telegrams look well. The editor, speaking of the two En- 
glish visitors now in the city, says: "We greet them to our 
mountain habitation, and bid them welcome to our orchard ; 
and that's considerable for an editor, especially if he has plural 
responsibilities to look after." Bishop Harrington reports 
from American Fort that every body is thriving there, and 
" doing as the Mormon creed directs — minding their own bus- 
iness." " That's good. Bishop," says the editor. The " Pas- 
senger-list of the 2d Ox-train, Captain J. D. Holladay," is given 
at length ; about half the immigrants come with wife and fam- 
ily, very many with five or six children. From Liverpool, the 
chief office for Europe, comes a gazette of " Releases and Ap- 
pointments," signed " Brigham Young, Jun., President of the 
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the British 
Isles and Adjacent Countries," accompauied by a dispatch, in 
which the " President for England " gives details of his visits 
to the Saints in Norway, and of his conversation with the 
United States minister at St. Petersburg. 

The Daily Telegraph, like its editor, is practical, and does 
not deal in extract. All the sheet, with the exception of a few 
columns, is taken up with business advertisements ; but these 



Westekn Editors. 121 

are not the least amusing part of the paper. A gigantic fig- 
ure of a man in high boots and felt hat, standing on a ladder 
and pasting up Messrs. Eldredge and Clawson's dry-goods ad- 
vertisement, occupies nearly half the back page. Mr. Birch, 
informs " j)arties hauling wheat from San Pete County " that 
his mill at Fort Birch is now running, and that it is situate at 
the mouth of Salt Creek Caiion, just above Nephi City, Juab 
County,. on the direct road to Pahranagat. A view of the fort, 
with posterns, parapets, embrasures, and a giant flag, heads the 
advertisement. But the cuts are not always so cheerful : one 
Far- western paper fills three-quarters of its front page with an 
engraving of a coffin. The editorial columns contain calls to 
the " brethren with teams " to aid the immigrants, an account 
of a "rather mixed case" of " double divorce " (Gentile), and 
of a prosecution of a man "for violation of the seventh com- 
mandment." A Mormon police report is headed " One drunk 
at the Calaboose." Defending himself against charges of " di- 
recting bishops " and " steadying the ark," the editor calls on 
the bishops to shorten their sermons : " we may get a crack 
for this, but we can't help it. We like variety, life, and short 
meetings." In a paragraph about his visitors, our friend the 
editor of the Telegraph said, a day or two after our arrival in 
the city, " If a stranger can escape the strychnine clique for 
three days after arrival, he is forever afterward safe. Gener- 
ally the first twenty-four hours are sufficient to prostrate even 
the very robust." In a few words of regret at a change in the 
Denver newspaper staff, our editor says : " However, a couple 
of sentences indicate that George has no intention of aban- 
doning the tripod. That's right : keep at it, my boy ; misery 
likes company." 

The day after we reached Denver, the Gazette, commenting 
on this same " George," said : " Captain "West has left the 
Rocky Mountains News office. We are not surprised, as we 
could never see how any respectable decent gentleman like 
George could get along with Governor Evans's paid hireling 
and whelp Avho edits that delectable sheet." Of the two pa- 
pers which exist in every town in the Union, each is always at 
work attempting to " use uj) " the other. I have seen the 
Democratic print of Chicago call its Republican opponent " a 
radical, disunion, disreputable, bankrupt, emasculated evening 

F 



122 Greatee Britaik. 

newspai^er concei^n of this city " — a string of terms by the side 
of which even Western utterances pale. 

A paragraph headed " The Millennium " tells us that the 
editors of the Telegraph and Deseret News were seen yester- 
day afternoon walking together toward the Twentieth Ward. 
Another paragrajoh records the ill success of an expedition 
against Indians who had been " raiding " down in " Dixie," 
or South Utah. A general order, signed " Lieut.-General Dan- 
iel H. Wells," and dated " Head-quarters, Nauvoo Legion," di- 
rects the assembly, for a three days' " big drill," of the forces 
of the various military districts of the Territory. The name 
of " Territorial Militia," under which alone the United States 
can permit the existence of the legion, is carefully omitted. 
This is not the only warlike advertisement in the paper : four- 
teen cases of Ballard rifles are offered in exchange for cattle, 
and other firms offer tents and side-arms to their friends. 
Amusements are not forgotten : a cricket-match between two 
Mormon settlements in Cache County is recorded, " Wellsville 
whipping Brigham City, with six wickets to go down ;" and is 
followed by an article in which the First President may have 
had a hand, pointing out that the Salt Lake Theatre is going 
to be the greatest of theatres, and that the favor of its audi- 
ence is a passport beyond Wallack's, and equal to Drury Lane 
or the Haymarket. In sharp contrast to these signs of present 
prosperity, the First Presidency announce the annual gather- 
ing of the surviving members of Zion's camp, the association 
of the first immigrant band. 

There is about the Mormon papers much that tells of long 
settlement and pros23erity. When I showed Stenhouse the 
Denver Gazette of our second day in that town, he said, 
" Well, Telegraph'' s better than that !" The Denver sheet is 
a literary curiosity of the first order. -.Printed on chocolate- 
colored paper, in ink of a not much darker hue, it is in parts 
illegible, to the reader's regret ; for what we were able to 
make out was good enough to make us wish for more. 

The difference between the Mormon and Gentile papers 
is strongly marked in the advertisements. The Deliver Ga- 
zette is filled with puffs of quacks and whisky-shops. In the 
column headed " Business Cards," Dr. Ermerins announces 
that he may be consulted by his patients in the " French, 



Westekn Editors. 123 

German, and English" tongues. Lower down we have the 
card of " Dr. Treat, Eclectic Physician and Surgeon," which is 
preceded by an advertisement of " Sulkies made to order," 
and followed by a leaded heading " Know thy Destiny : Ma- 
dame Thornton, the English Astrologist and Psychometrician, 
has located herself at Hudson, New York ; by the aid of an 
instrument of intense power, known as the Psychomo trope, 
she guarantees to produce a life-like picture of the future hus- 
band or wife of the applicant." There is a strange turning 
toward the supernatural among this people. Astrology is 
openly professed as a science throughout the United States; 
the success of spiritualism is amazing. The most sensible men 
are not exempt from the weakness : the dupes of the astrolo- 
gers are not the uneducated Irish ; they are the strong-mind- 
ed, half-educated Western men, shrewd and keen in trade, 
brave in war, material and cold in faith, it would be supposed, 
but credulous to folly, as we know, when personal revelation, 
the supernaturalism of the present day, is set before them in 
the crudest and least attractive forms. A little lower, " Char- 
ley Eyser " and " Gus Fogus " advertise their bars. The lat- 
ter announces "Lager beer at only 10 cents," in a "cool re- 
treat," "fitted up with green-growing trees." A returned 
warrior heads his announcement, in huge capitals, " Back 
Home Again — An Old Hand at the Bellows — The Soldier 
Blacksmith : — S. M. Logan." In a country where weights and 
measures are rather a matter of practice than of law, Mr. 
O'Connell does well to add to "Lager beer, 15 cents," 
" Glasses hold two bushels." John Morris, of the " Little Gi- 
ant " or " Theatre Saloon," asks us to " call and see him ;" 
while his rivals of the " Progressive Saloon " offer the " finest 
liquors that the East can command." Morris Sigi, whose 
"lager is pronounced A ISTo. 1 by all who have used it," bids us 
" give him a fair trial, and satisfy ourselves as to the false re- 
ports in circulation." Daniel Marsh, dealer in "breech-load- 
ing guns and revolvers," adds, " and any thing that may be 
wanted from a cradle to a cofiin, both inclusive, made to or- 
der. Jm Indian Lodge on view, for sale ;" but he fails to name 
it in his advertisement : the Utes brought it in too late for 
insertion, perhaps. 

Advertisements of freight-trains now starting to the East, 



124 Greater Britaii^. 

of mail-coaches to Buckskin Joe — advertisements slanting, 
topsy-turvy, and sideways turned — complete the outer sheet; 
but some of them, through bad ink, printer's errors, strange 
English, and wilder Latin, are wholly unintelligible. It is 
hard to make much of this, for instance : " Mr. ^sculapius, 
no offense, I hope, as this is written extempore and ipso 
facto. But, perhaps, I ought not to disregard ex unci disce 
omnes." 

In an editorial on the English visitors then in Denver, the 
chance of putting into their mouths a puff of the Territory of 
Colorado was not lost. We were made to " appreciate the 
native energy and wealth of industry necessary in building up 
such a Star of Empire as Colorado." The next paragraph is 
communicated from Conejos, in the south of the Territory, 
and says : " The election has now passed off, and I am confi- 
dent that we can beat any ward in Denver, and give them two 
in the game, for rascality in voting." Another leader calls on 
the people of Denver to remember that there are two men in 
the Calaboose for mule-stealing, and- that the last man locked 
up for the offense was allowed to escape : some cottonwood- 
trees still exist, it believes. In former times, there was for 
the lynching here hinted at a reason which no longer exists : 
a man shut up in gaol built of adobe, or sun-dried brick, could 
scratch his way through the crumbling wall in two days, so 
the citizens generally hanged him in one. N^ow that the 
jails are in brick and stone, the job might safely be left to 
the sheriff; but the people of Denver seem to trust themselves 
better even than they do their delegate. Bob Wilson. 

A year or two ago the jails were so crazy that Coloradan 
criminals, when given their choice whether they w^ould be 
hanged in a week, or " as soon after breakfast to-morrow as 
shall be convenient to the sheriff and agreeable, Mr. Prisoner, 
to you," as the Texan formula runs, used to elect for the quick 
delivery, on the ground that otherwise they would catch their 
deaths of cold — at least, so the Denver story runs. They 
have, however, a method of getting the jails inspected here 
which might be found useful at home : it consists of #ie sim- 
ple plan of giving the governor of a jail an opportunity of 
seeing the practical working of the system by locking him up 
inside for a while. 



Western Editoes. 125 

These Far-western papers are written or compiled under 
difficulties almost overwhelming. Mr. Frederick J. Stanton, 
at Denver, told me that often he had been forced to " set up " 
and print, as well as " edit," the paper which he owns. Type 
is not always to be found. In its early days, the Alta Cali- 
fornia once appeared with a^paragraph which ran, "I have 
no W in my type, as there is none in the Spanish alphabet. 
I have sent to the Sandwich Islands for this letter ; in the 
meantime vve must use two Y's." 

Till I had seen the editor's rooms in Denver, Austin, and 
Salt Lake City, I had no conception of the point to which dis- 
comfort could be carried. For all these hardships, payment 
is small and slow. It consists often of little but the satisfac- 
tion which it is to the editor's vanity to be " liquored " by the 
best man of the place, treated to an occasional chat with the 
governor of the Territory, to a chair in the overland Mail Of- 
fice whenever he walks in, to the hand of the hotel proprietor 
whenever he comes near the bar, and to a pistol-shot once or 
twice in a month. 

It must not be supposed that the Vedette does the Mor- 
mons no harm : the perpetual reiteration in the Eastern and 
English papers of three sets of stories alone would suffice to 
break down a flourishing power. The three lines that are in' 
variably taken as foundations for their stories are these — that 
the Mormon women are wretched, and would fain get away, 
but are checked by the Danites ; that the Mormons are ready 
to fight with the Federal troops with the hope of success; 
that robbery of the people by the Apostles ^nd Elders is at the 
bottom of Mormonism — or, as the Vedette puts it, " On tith- 
ing and loaning hang all the law and the profits." 

If the mere fact of the existence of the Vedette effectually 
refutes the stories of the acts of the Danites in these modern 
days, and therefore disposes of the first set of stories, the third 
is equally answered by a glance at its pages. Columns of par- 
agraphs, sheets of advertisements, testify to the foundation by 
industry, in the most frightful desert on earth, of an agricul- 
tural community which California herself can not match. The 
Mormons may Avell call their country *' Deseret " — " land of the 
bee." The process of fertilization goes on day by day. Six 
or seven years ago Southern Utah was a desert bare as Salt 



126 Greater Britain. 

Bush Plains. Irrigation from the fresh-water lake was car- 
ried out under episcopal direction, and the result is the growth 
of fifty kinds of grapes alone. Cotton-mills and vineyards are 
springing up on every side, and "Dixie" begins to look down 
on its parent, the Salt Lake Valley. Irrigation from the 
mountain rills has done this miracle, ^06 say, though the Saints 
lindoubtedly believe that God's hand is in it, helping miracu- 
■ usly " His peculiar people." 

In face of Mormon prosperity, it is worthy of notice that 
ITtah was settled on the Wakefieldian system, though Brigham 
knows nothing of Wakefield. Town population and country 
population grew up side by side in every valley, and the plow 
was not allowed to gain on the machine-saw and the shuttle. 

It is not only in water and verdure that Utah is naturally 
poor. On the mining-map of the States, the countries that 
lie around Utah — Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Montana — are 
one blaze of yellow, and blue, and red, colored from end to 
end with the tints that are used to denote the existence of 
precious metals. Utah is blank at present — ^blank, the Mor- 
mons say, by nature ; Gentiles say, merely through the ab- 
sence of survey; and they do their best to circumvent 
Mother Nature. Every fall the " strychine " party raise the 
cry of gold discoveries in Utah, in the hope of bringing a 
rush of miners down to Salt Lake City too late for them to 
get away again before the snows begin. The presence of some 
thousands of broad-brimmed rowdies in Salt Lake City for 
a winter would be the death of Mormonism, they beheve. 
Within the last few days, I am told that prospecting parties 
have found " pay dirt " in City Canon, which, however, they 
had first themselves carefully " salted " with gold-dust. There 
is coal at the settlement at which we breakfasted on our way 
from Weber River to Salt Lake ; and Stenhouse tells us that 
the only difference between the Utah coal and that of Wales 
is, that the latter will " burn," and the former loonH! 

Poor as Utah is by nature, clear though it be that what- 
ever value the soil now possesses, represents only the loving 
labor bestowed upon it by the Saints, it is doubtful whether 
they are to continue to possess it, even though the remaining 
string of Vedette-horn stories assert that Brigham " threatens 
hell " to the Gentiles that would expel him. 



Utah. 127 

The constant, teasing, wasp-like pertinacity of the Vedette 
has done some harm to liberty of thought throughout the 
world. 



CHAPTER XYII. 

UTAH. 



" Whej^ you are driven hence, where shall you go?" 

" We take no thought for the morrow ; the Lord will guide 
His people," was my rebuke from Elder Stenhouse, delivered 
in the half-solemn, half-laughing manner characteristic of the 
Saints. " You say miracles are passed and gone," he went 
on ; " but if God has ever interfered to protect a Church, he 
has interposed on our behalf. In 1857, when the ^'^ole army 
of the United States was let slip at us under Albert S. John- 
ston, we were given strength to turn them aside, and defeat 
them without a blow. The Lord permitted us to dictate our 
own terms of peace. Again, when the locusts came in such 
swarms as to blacken the whole valley, and fill the air with a 
living fog, God sent millions of strange new gulls, and these 
devoured the locusts, and saved us from destruction. The 
Lord Avill guide His people." 

Often as I discussed the future of Utah and their Church 
with Mormons, I could never get from them any answer but 
this; they would never even express a belief, as will many 
Western Gentiles, that no attempt will be made to expel 
them from the country they now hold. They can not help 
seeing how immediate is the danger : from the American press 
there comes a cry, " Let us have this polygamy put down ; its 
existence is a disgrace to England, from which it springs, a 
shame to America, in which it dwells, to the Federal Govern- 
ment, whose laws it outrages and defies. How long will you 
continue to tolerate this retrogression from Christianity, this 
insult to civilization ?" 

With the N^ew Englanders, the question is political as well 
as theological, personal as well as political — political, mainly 
because there is a great likeness between Mormon expressions 
of belief in the divine origin of polygamy and the Southern 
answers to the Abolitionists : " Abraham was a slave-owner. 



128 Greater Britain. 

and father of the faithful ;" " David, the best-loved of God, 
was a polygamist ;" " Show us a Biblical prohibition of slav- 
ery ;" " Show us a denunciation of polygamy, and we'll believe 
you." It is this similarity of the defensive positions of Mor- 
monism and slavery which has led to the present peril of the 
Salt Lake Church: the New Englanders look on the Mor- 
mons, not only as heretics, but as friends to the slave-owners ; 
on the other hand, if you hear a man warmly praise the Mor- 
mons, you may set him down as a Southerner, or, at the least, 
a Democrat. 

Another reason for the hostility of New England is, that 
while the discredit of Mormonism falls upon America, the 
American people have but little share in its existence : a few 
of the lea^rs are New Englanders and New Yorkers, but of 
the rank and file, not one. In every ten immigrants, the mis- 
sionaries count upon finding that four come from England, 
two from Wales, one from the Scotch lowlands, one from 
Sweden, one from Switzerland, and one from Prussia : from 
Catholic countries, none; from all America, none. It is 
through this purely local and temporary association of ideas 
that we see the strange sight of a party of tolerant, large- 
hearted Churchmen, eager to march their armies against a 
Church. 

If we put aside for a moment the question of the moral 
right to crush Mormonism in the name of truth, we find that 
it is, at all events, easy enough to do it. There is no difficulty 
in finding legal excuses for action — no danger in backing the 
Federal legislation with military force. The legal point is 
clear enough — clear upon a double issue. Congress can legis- 
late for the Territories in social matters — ^has, in fact, already 
done so. Polygamy is at this moment punishable in Utah, 
but the law is, pending the completion of the railroad, not en- 
forced. Without extraordinary action, its enforcement would 
be impossible, for Mormon juries will give no verdict antag- 
onistic to their Church ; but it is not only in this matter that 
the Mormons have been offenders. They have sinned also 
against the land-laws of America. The Church, Brigham, 
Kimball, all are landholders on a scale not contemplated by 
the " Homestead " laws — unless to be forbidden ; doubly, 
therefore, are the Mormons at the mercy of the Federal Con- 



Utah. 129 

gress. There is a loop-hole open in the matter of polygamy 
— that adopted by the New York Communists, when they 
chose each a woman to be his legal wife, and so put themselves 
without the reach of law. This method of escape, I have 
been assured by Mormon elders, is one that nothing could 
force them to adopt. Rather than indirectly destroy their 
Church by any such weak compliance, they would again re- 
nounce their homes, and make their painful way across the 
wilderness to some new Deseret. 

It is not likely that N"ew England interference will hinge 
upon plurality. A " difficulty " can easily be made to arise 
upon the land question, and no breach of the principle of tol- 
eration will, on the surface at least, be visible. No surveys 
have been held in the Territory since 1857, no lands within 
the territorial limits have been sold by the Federal land-office. 
Not only have the limitations of the " Homestead " and " Pre- 
emj^tion " laws been disregarded, but Salt Lake City, with its 
palace, its theatre, and hotels, is built upon the public lands 
of the United States. On the other hand, Mexican titles are 
respected in Arizona and New Mexico; and as Utah was 
Mexican soil when, before the treaty of Gaudalupe Hidalgo, 
the Mormons settled on its wastes, it seems hard that their 
claims should not be equally respected. 

After all, the theory of Spanish authority was a ridiculous 
fiction. The Mormons were the first occupants of the coun- 
try which now forms the Territories of Utah and Colorado, 
and the State of Nevada, and the Mormons were thus annexed 
to the United States without being in the least degree consult- 
ed. It is true that they might be said to have occupied the 
country as American citizens, and so to have carried Amer- 
ican sovereignty with them into the wilderness ; but this, 
again, is a European, not an American theory. American cit- 
izens are such, not as men born upon a certain soil, but as 
being citizens of a State of the Union or an organized Terri- 
tory ; and though the Mormons may be said to have accepted 
their position as citizens of the Territory of Utah, still they 
did so on the understanding that it should continue a Mor- 
mon country, where Gentiles should, at the most, be barely 
tolerated. 

We need not go further into the mazes of public law, or of 

F2 



130 Greater Britain. 

ex post facto American enactments. The Mormons them- 
selves admit that the letter of the law is against them ; but 
say that while it is claimed that Boston and Philadelphia may 
fitly legislate for the Mormons three thousand miles away, 
because Utah is a Territory, not a State, men forget that it is 
Boston and Philadelphia themselves who force Utah to re- 
main a Territory, although they admitted the less populous 
Nebraska, Nevada, and Oregon to their rights as States. 

If, wholly excluding morals from the calculation, there can 
be no doubt upon the points of the law, there can be as little 
ujDon the military question. Of the fifteen hundred miles of 
waterless tract or desert that we crossed, seven hundred have 
been annihilated: 1869 may see the railroad track in the 
streets of Salt Lake City. This not only settles the military 
question, but is meant to do so. When men lay four miles of 
a railroad in a day, and average two miles a day for a whole 
year, when a Government bribes high enough to secure so 
startling a rate of progress, there is something more than 
commerce or settlement in the wind; The Pacific Railroad is 
not merely meant to be the shortest line from New York to 
San Francisco, but it is meant to j)ut down Mormonism. 

If the Federal Government decides to attack these peace- 
able citizens of a Territory that should long since have been 
a State, they certainly will not fight, and they no less surely 
will not disperse. Polynesia or Mexico is their goal ; and in 
the Marquesas or in Sonora they may, perhaps, for a few 
years at least, be let alone, again to prove the forerunners of 
English civilization — planters of Saxon institutions and the 
English tongue, once more to perform their mission, as they 
performed it in Missouri and in Utah. 

When we turn from the simple legal question, and the still 
more simple military one, to the moral point involved in the 
forcible suiDpression of plural marriage in one State by the 
force of all the others, we find the consideration of the matter 
confused by the apparent analogy between the so-called cru- 
sade against slavery and the proposed crusade against polyg- 
amy. There is no real resemblance between the cases. In 
the strictest sense, there was no more a crusade against 
slavery than there is a crusade against snakes on the part of a 
man who strikes one that bit him. The purest republicans 



Utah. 131 

have never pretended that the abolition of slavery was the 
justification of the war. The South rose in rebellion, and, in 
rising, gave New England an opportunity for the destruction 
in America of an institution at variance with the republican 
form of government, and aggressive in its tendencies. So far 
is polygamy from being opposed in spirit to democracy, that 
it is impossible here in Salt Lake City not to see that it is 
the most levelling of all social institutions — Mormonism the 
most democratic of religions. A rich man in New York 
leaves his sons large property, and founds a family ; a rich 
Mormon leaves his twenty or thirty sons each a miserable 
fraction of his money, and each son must trudge out into the 
world and toil for himself. Brigham's sons — those of them 
who are not gratuitously employed in hard service for the 
Church in foreign parts — are cattle-drivers, small farmers, 
ranchmen. One of them was the only poorly-clad boy I saw 
in Salt Lake City. A system of polygamy, in which all the 
wives, and consequently all the children, are equal before the 
law, is a powerful engine of democracy. 

The general moral question of whether Mormonism is to be 
put down by the sword because the Latter-day Saints differ 
in certain social customs from other Christians, is one for the 
preacher and the casuist, not for a travelling observer of En- 
glish-speaking countries as they are. Mormonism comes un- 
der my observation as the religious and social system of the 
most successful of all pioneers of English civilization. From 
this point of view it would be an immediate advantage to t^ie 
Avorld that they should be driven out once more into the wil- 
derness, again to found an England in Mexico, in Polynesia, 
or on Red River. It may be an immediate gain to civiliza- 
tion, but America herself was founded by schismatics upon a 
basis of tolerance to all ; and there^are still to be found Amer- 
icans who think it would be the severest blow that has been 
dealt to liberty since the St. Bartholomew, were she to lend 
her enormous power to systematic persecution at the cannon's 
mouth. 

The question of where to draw the line is one of interest. 
Great Britain draws it at black faces, and would hardly tol- 
erate the existence among her white subjects in London of 
such a sect as that of the Maharajas of Bombay. "If you 



Utah. 183 

draw the line at black faces," say the Mormons, " why should 
you not let the Americans draw it at two thousand miles from 
Washington ?" » 

The moral question can not be dissociated from that of 
Mormon history. The Saints marched from Missouri and 
Illinois into no man's land, intending there to live out of the 
reach of those who differed from them, as do the Russian dis- 
senters transported in past ages to the provinces of Taurida 
and Kherson. It is by no fault of theirs, they say, that they 
are citizens of the United States. 

There is in the Far West a fast increasing party who would 
leave people to be polygnists, polyandrists, free-lovers. Shak- 
ers, or monogamists, as they please ; who would place the so- 
cial relations as they have placed religion — out of the reach of 
the Isiw. I need hardly say that public opinion has such over- 
whelming force in America that it is probable that even un- 
der a system of perfect toleration by law, two forms of the 
family relation would never be found existing side by side. 
Polygnists would continue to migrate to Mormon-land, free- 
lovers to New York, Shakers to New England. Some will 
find in this a reason for, and some a reason against, a change. 
In any case, a crusade against Mormonism will hardly draw 
sympathy from Nebraska, from Michigan, from Kansas. 

Many are found who say, " Leave Mormonism to itselr, 
and it will die." The Pacific Railroad alone, they think, will 
kill it. Those Americans v/ho know Utah best are not of this 
opinion. Mormonism is no superstition of the past. There 
is huge vitality in the polygamic Church. Emerson once 
spoke to me of Unitarianism, Buddhism, and Mormonism as 
three religions which, right or wrong, are full of force. " The 
Mormons only need to be persecuted," said Elder Frederick to 
me, " to become as powerful as the Mohammedans." It is, in- 
deed, more than doubtful whether polygamy can endure side 
by side with American monogamy — it is certain that Mormon 
priestly power and Mormon mysteries can not, in the long run, 
withstand the presence of a large Gentile population; but if 
Mormon titles to land are respected, and if great mineral 
wealth is not found to exist in Utah, Mormonism will not be ex- 
posed to any much larger Gentile intrusion than it has to cope 
with now. Settlers who can go to California or to Colorado 



134 Greater Britain. 

" pares " will hardly fix themselves in the Utah desert. The 
Mexican table-lands will be annexed before Gentile immi- 
grants seriously trouble Brigham. Gold and New England 
are the most dreaded foes of Morraondom. Nothing can save 
polygamy if lodes and placers such as those of all the surround- 
ing States are found in Utah ; nothing can save it if the New 
Euglanders determine to put it down. 

Were Congress to enforce the homestead laws in Utah, 
and provide for the presence of an overwhelming Gentile pop- 
ulation, polygamy would not only die of itself, but drag Mor- 
monism down in its fall. Brigham knows more completely 
than we can the necessity of isolation. He would not be 
likely to await the blow which increased Gentile immigration 
would deal to his power. 

If New England decides to acl, the table-lands of Mexico 
w^ll see played once more the sad comedy of Utah. Again 
the Mormons will march into Mexican territory, again to v/ake 
some day, and find it American. Theirs, however, will once 
more be the pride of having proved the pioneers of that En- 
glish civilization which is destined to overspread the temper- 
ate world. The treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo annexed Utah 
to the United States, but Brigham Young annexed it to An- 
glo-Saxondom. 



CPIAPTER XYHI. 

NAMELESS 7iLPS. 



At the Post-ofiice in Main Street I gave Mr. Dixon a few 
last messages for home — he one to me for some Egyptian 
friends ; and, with a shake and a wave, we parted, to meet in 
London after between us completing the circuit of the globe. 

This time again I was not alone : an Irish miner from 
Montana, with a bottle of whisky, a revolver and pick, shared 
the back seat with the mail-bags. Before we had forded the 
Jordan he had sung " The wearing of the Green," and told me 
the day and the hour at which the republic was to be pro- 
claimed at his native village in Galway. Like a true Irish- 
man of the South or West, he was happy only when he could 



Nameless Alps. 



135 



be generous ; and so much joy did he show when I discover- 
ed that the cork had slipped from my flask, and left me de- 
pendent on him for my escape from the alkaline poison, that 
I half believed he had drawn it himself when we stopped to 
change horses for mules. Certain it is that he pressed his 
whisky so fast upon me and the various drivers, that the day 
we most needed its aid there was none, and the bottle itself 
had ended its career by serving as a target for a trial of 
breech-loading pistols. 

At the sixth ranch from the city, which stands on the 
shores of the lake, and close to the foot of the mountaifts, we 
found Porter Rockwell, accredited chief of the Danites, the 
" Avenging Angels " of Utah, and leader, it is said, of the 
^'' White Indians " at the Mountain Meadows Massacre. 




PORTER ROCKWELL. 



Since 1840 there has been no name of greater terror in the 
West than Rockwell's; but in 1860 his death was reported in 
England, and the career of the great Brother of Gideon was 
ended, as we thought. I was told in Salt Lake City that he 
was still alive and well, and his portrait was among those that 
I got from Mr. Ottinger; but I am not convinced that the 
man I saw, and Avhose picture I possess, Avas in fact the Por- 
ter Rockwell who murdered Stephenson in 1842. It may be 



136 Greater Britain. 

convenient to have two or three men to pass by the one name; 
and I suspect that this is so in the Rockwell case. 

Under the name of Porter Rockwell, some man (or men) 
has been the terror of Mississi]3pi Valley, of Plains and Pla- 
teau, for thirty years. In 1841 Joe Smith prophesied the 
death of Governor Boggs, of Missouri, within six months: 
within that time he was shot — rumor said, by Rockwell. 
When the Danite was publicly charged with having done the 
deed for fifty dollars and a wagon-team, he swore he'd shoot 
any man Avho said he'd shot Boggs for gain; " but if I am 
charged with shooting him, they'll have to prove it " — words 
that looked like guilt. In 1842 Stephenson died by the same 
hand, it is believed. RockAvell w^as known to be the working- 
chief of the band organized in 1838 to defend the First Pres- 
idency by any means whatever, fair or foul, known at various 
times as the " Big Fan " that should winnow the chaff from 
the wheat ; the " Daughter of Zion," the " Destructives," the 
" Flying Angels," the " Brother of Gideon," the " Destroy- 
ing Angels." "Arise and thresh, O daughter of Zion, for I 
will make thy horn iron, and will make thy hoofs brass ; and 
thou shall beat in pieces many people ; and I will consecrate 
their gain unto the Lord, and their substance unto the lords of 
the whole earth " — this was the motto of the band. 

Little was heard of the Danites from the time that the 
Mormons were driven from Illinois and Missouri until 1852, 
when murder after murder, massacre after massacre, occurred 
in the Grand Plateau. Bands of immigrants, of settlers on 
their road to California, parties of United States officers, es- 
caping Mormons, were attacked by " Indians," and found 
scalped by the next whites who came upon their trail. It was 
rumored in the Eastern States that the red men were Mor- 
mons in disguise, following the tactics of the Anti-renters of 
New York. In the case of Almon Babbitt, the " Indians " 
were proved to have been white. 

The atrocities culminated in the Mountain Meadows Mas- 
sacre in 185*7, when hundreds of men, women, and children 
were murdered by men armed and clothed as Indians, but 
sworn to by some who escaped as being Avhites. Porter Rock- 
well has had the infamy of this tremendous slaughter jailed on 
to the huge mass of his earlier deeds of blood — whether right- 



Nameless Alps. 137 

ly or wrongly, who shall say ? The man that I saw was the 
man that Captain Burton saw in 1860. His death was solemn- 
ly recorded in the autumn of that year, yet of the identity of 
the person I saw with the person described by Captain Burton 
there can be no question. The bald, frowning forehead, the 
sinister smile, the long grizzly curls falling upon the back, the 
red cheek, the coal beard, the gray eye, are not to be mis- 
taken. Rockwell or not, he is a man capable of any deed. I 
had his photograph in my pocket, and wanted to get him to 
sign it ; but when, in awe of his glittering bowie and of his 
fame, I asked, by way of caution, the ranchman — a new-come 
Paddy — whether Rockwell could write, the fellow told me 
with many an oath that " the boss " was as innocent of letters 
as a babe. " As for writin'," he said, " cuss me if he's on it. 
You bet he's not — you bet." 

N'ot far beyond Rockwell's, we drove close to the bench- 
land ; and I was able to stop for a moment and examine the 
rocks. From the veranda of the Mormon poet Naisbitt's 
house in Salt Lake City, I had remarked a double line of ter- 
race running on one even level round the whole of the great 
valley to the south, cut by nature along the base alike of the 
Oquirrh and the Wasatch. 

I had thought it possible that the terrace was the result of 
the varying hardness of the strata ; but, near Black Rock, on 
the overland track, I discovered that where the terrace lines 
have crossed the mountain precipices, they are continued 
merely by deep stains upon the rocks. The inference is that 
within extremely recent, if not historic times, the water has 
stood at these levels from two to three hundred feet above 
the present Great Salt Lake City, itself 4300 feet above the 
sea. Three days' journey farther west, on the Reese's River 
Range, I detected similar stains. Was the whole basin of 
the Rocky Mountains — here more than a thousand miles 
across — once filled with a huge sea, of which the two Sierras 
were the shores, and the Wasatch, Goshoot, Waroja, Toi 
Abbe, Humboldt, Washoe, and a hundred other ranges, the 
rocks and isles ? The Great Salt Lake is but the largest^f 
many such. I saw one on Mirage Plains that is Salter than 
its greater fellow. Carson Sink is evidently the bed of a small- 
er, bitter lake ; and there are salt pools in dozens scattered 



Nameless Alps. 139 

through Ruby and Smoky valleys. The Great Salt Lake it- 
self is sinking year 'by year, and the sage-brush is gaining 
upon the alkali desert throughout the Grand Plateau. All 
these signs point to the rapid drying-up of a great sea, owing 
to an alteration of climatic conditions. 

In the Odd Fellows' Library at San Francisco I found a 
map of North America, signed " John Harvis, A.M.," and 
dated "1605," which shows a great lake in the country now 
comprised in the Territories of Utah and Dacotah, with a 
width of fifteen degrees, and is named "Thongo or Thoya." 
It is not likely that this inland sea is a mere exaggeration of 
the present Great Salt Lake, because the views of that sheet 
of water are everywhere limited by islands in such a way as 
to give to the eye the effect of exceeding narrowness. It is 
possible that the Jesuit fathers, and other Spanish travellers 
from California, may have looked from the Utah Mountains 
on the dwindling remnant of a great inland sea. 

On we jogged and jolted, till we lost sight of the Ameri- 
can Dead Sea and of its lovely valley, and got into a caiion 
floored with huge boulders and slabs of roughened rock, 
where I expected each minute to undergo the fate of that In- 
dian traveller who received such a jolt that he bit off the tip 
of his own tongue, or of Horace Greeley, whose head was 
bumped, it is said, through the roof of his conveyance. Here, 
as upon the eastern side the Wasatch, the track was marked 
by never-ending lines of skeletons of mules and oxen. 

On the first evening from Salt Lake, we escaped once more 
from man at Stockton, a Gentile mining settlement in Rush 
Valley, too small to be caUed a village, though possessed of a 
municipality, and claiming the title of " city." By night we 
crossed by Reynolds's Pass the Parolom, or Cedar Range, in 
a two-horse " jerky," to which we had been shifted for speed 
and safety. Upon the heights the frost was bitter ; and when 
we stopped at 3 a.m. for "supper," in which breakfast was 
combined, we crawled into the stable like flies in autumn, 
half killed by the sudden chill. My miner spoke but once all 
night. " It's right cold," he said ; but fifty times at least he 
sang " Wearing of the Green." It was his only tune. 

Soon after light we passed the spot where Capitain Gun- 
nison, of the Federal Engineers, who had been in 1853 the 



140 Greater Britain. 

first explorer of the Smoky Hill route, was killed " by the 
TJte Indians." Gunnison Avas an old enemy of the Mormons, 
and the spot is ominously near to Rockwell's home. Here we 
came out once more into the alkali, and our troubles from 
dust began. For hours we were in a desert white as snow ; but 
for reward we gained a glorious view of the Goshoot Range 
which we crossed by night, climbing silently on foot for hours 
in the moonlight. The walking saved us from the cold. 

The third day — a Sunday morning — we were at the foot of 
the Waroja Mountains, with Egan Canon for our pass, hewn 
by nature through the living rock. You dare swear you see 
the chisel-marks upon the stone. A gold-mill had years ago 
been erected here, and failed. The heavy machinery was lost 
upon the road ; but the four stone walls contained between 
them the wreck of the lighter " plant." 

As we jolted and journeyed on across the succeeding plain, 
we spied in the far distance a group of black dots upon the 
alkali. Man seems very small in the infinite expanse of the 
Grand Plateau — the roof, as it were, of the world. At the 
end of an hour we were upon them — a company of " overland- 
ers " " tracking " across the continent with mules. First came 
two mounted men, well armed with Deringers in the belt, and 
Ballard breech-loaders on the thigh, prepared for ambush — 
ready for action against elk or red-skin. About fifty yards 
behind these scowling fellows came the main band of beard- 
ed, red-shirted diggers, in huge boots and felt hats, each man 
riding one mule, and driving another laden with packs and 
buckets. As we came up, the main body halted, and an in- 
terchange of compliments began. " Say, mister, thet's a slim 
horse of yourn." " Guess not — guess he's all sorts of a horse, 
he air. And how far might it be to the State of Varmount?" 
" Wall, guess the boys down to hum will be kinder joyed to 
see us, howsomever that may be." Just at this moment a rat- 
tlesnake was spied, and every revolver discharged with a shout, 
all hailing the successful shot with a " Bully for you ; thet 
hit him whar he lives." And on, without more ado, we went. 

Even the roughest of these overlanders has in him some- 
thing more than roughness. As far as appearance goes, every 
woman of the Far West is a duchess, each man a Coriolanus. 
The royal gait, the imperial glance and frown, belong to every 



Nameless Alps. 141 

ranchman in Nevada. Every fellow that you meet upon the 
track near Stockton or Austin City walks as though he were 
defying lightning, yet this without silly strut or braggadocio. 
Nothing can be more complete than the ranchman's self-com- 
mand, save in the one point of oaths ; the strongest, freshest, 
however, of their moral features is a grand enthusiasm, amount- 
ing sometimes to insanity. As for their oaths, they tell you 
it is nothing unless the air is " blue with cusses." At one of 
the ranches where there was a woman, she said quietly to me, 
in the middle of an awful burst of swearing, " Guess Bill 
swears steep ;" to which I replied, " Guess so " — the only al- 
lusion I ever heard or hazarded to Western swearing. 

Leaving to our north a snowy range — nameless here, but 
marked on European maps as the East Humboldt — we reach- 
ed the foot of the Ruby Valley Mountains on the Sunday after- 
noon in glowing sunshine, and crossed them in a snow-storm. 
In the night we -journeyed up and down the Diamond or 
Quartz Range, and morning found us at the foot of the Pond 
Chain. At the ranch — where, in the absence of elk, we ate 
" bacon," and dreamed w^e breakfasted — I chatted with an 
agent of the Mail Company on the position of the ranchman, 
divisible, as he told me, into " cooks and hostlers." The cooks, 
my experience had taught me, were the aptest scholars, the 
greatest politicians ; the hostlers men of war, and completest 
masters of the art of Western swearing. The cooks had a 
New England cut ; the hostlers, like Southerners, wore their 
hair all down their backs. I begged an explanation of the 
reason for the marked distinction. " They are picked," he 
said, " from different classes. When a boy comes to me and 
asks for something to do, I give him a look, and see what kind 
of stuff he's made of. If he's a gay duck out for a six- weeks' 
spree, I send him down here, or to Bitter Wells ; but if he's a 
clerk or a poet, or any such sorj^er fool as that, why then I set 
him cooking ; and plaguy good cooks they make, as you must 
find." 

The drivers on this portion of the route are as odd fellows 
as are the ranchmen. Wearing huge jack-boots, flannel shirts 
tucked into their trowsers, but no coat or vest, and hats with 
enormous brims, they have their hair long, and their beards 
untrimmed. Their oaths, I need hardly say, are fearful. At 



142 Gejeatek Britain. 

niglit they wrap themselves in an enormous cloak, drink as 
much whisky as their passengers can spare them, crack their 
whips, and yell strange yells. They are quarrelsome and over- 
bearing, honest probably, but eccentric in their ways of show- 
ing it. They belong chiefly to the mixed Irish and German 
race, and have all been in Australia during the gold-rush, and 
in California before deep sinking replaced the surface diggings. 
They will tell you how they often washed out and gambled 
away a thousand ounces in a month, living like Roman em- 
perors, then started in digging-life again upon the charity of 
their wealthier fi'iehds. They hate men dressed in " biled 
shirts " or in " store-clothes,'* and show their aversions in 
strange ways. I had no objection myself to build fires and 
fetch wood ; but I drew the line at going into the sage-brush 
to catch the mules, that not being a business which I felt com- 
petent to undertake. The season was advanced, the snows had 
not yet reached the valleys, which were parched by the drought 
of all the summer, feed for the mules was scarce, and they 
wandered a long way. Time after time we would drive into 
a station, the driver saying, with strange oaths, " Guess them 
mules is clared out from this here ranch ; guess they is into 
this sage-brush ;" and it would be an hour before the mules 
would be discovered feeding in some forgotten valley. Mean- 
while the miner and myself v/ould have revolver practice at 
the skeletons and telegraph-posts when sage fowl failed us, 
and rattlesnakes grew scarce. 

After all, it is easy to speak of the eccentricities of dress 
and manner displayed by Western men, but Eastern men and 
Europeans upon the Plateau are not the prim creatures of 
Fifth Avenue or Pall Mall. From San Francisco I sent home 
an excellent photograph of myself in the clothes in which I 
had crossed the Plateau, those being the only ones I had to 
wear till my baggage came round from Panama. The result 
was that my oldest friends failed to recognize the portrait. 
At the foot I had written " A Border Rufiian :" they beUeved 
not the likeness, but the legend. 

The difiiculties of dress upon these mountain ranges are 
great indeed. To sit one night exposed to keen frost and bit- 
ing wind, and the next day to toil for hours up a moimtain-side 
beneath a blazing sun are very opposite conditions. I found 



Nameless Alps. 143 

my dress no bad one. At night I wore a Canadian fox-fur 
cap, Mormon 'coon-skin gloves, two coats, and the whole of 
my light silk shirts. By day I took off the coats, the gloves 
and cap, and walked in my shirts, adding but a Panama hat to 
my " fit-out." 

As we began the ascent to the Pond River Range, we 
caught up a buUock-train, which there was not room to pass. 
The miner and myself turned out from the jerky, and for hours 
climbed alongside the wagons. I was struck by the freema- 
sonry of this moimtain travel : Bryant, the miner, had come to 
the end of his " solace," as the most famed chewing-tobacco in 
these parts is called. Going up to the nearest teamster, he 
asked for some, and was at once presented with a huge cake 
— enough, I should have thought, to have lasted a Channel pi- 
lot for ten years. 

The climb was long enough to give me a deep insight into 
the inner mysteries of bullock-driving. Each of the great two- 
storied Californian wagons was drawn by twelve stout oxen 
still, the pace was not a mile an hour, accomplished, as it seem- 
ed to me, not so much by the aid as in spite of tremendous 
flogging. Each teamster carried a short-handled whij) with a 
twelve-foot leathern lash, which was wielded with two hands, 
and, after many a whirl, brought down along the whole length 
of the back of each bullock of the team in turn, the stroke be- 
ing accompanied by a shout of the bullock's name, and follow- 
ed, as it was preceded, by a string of the most explosive oaths. 
The favorite names for bullocks were those of noted public 
characters and of Mormon elders, and cries were frequent of 
"Ho, Brigham!" "Ho, Joseph!" "Ho, Grant!" the blow 
falling with the accented syllable. The London Society for 
the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would find at Pond 
River Range an excellent opening for a mission. The ap- 
pointed officer should be supplied with two Deringers and a 
well-filled whisky-barrel. 

Through a gap in the mountain crest we sighted the West 
Humboldt Range, across an open country dotted here and 
there with stunted cedar, and, crossing Smoky Valley, we 
plunged into a deep pass in the Toi Abbe Range, and reached 
Austin — a mining-town of importance, rising two years old — 
in the afternoon of the fourth day from Salt Lake City. 



144 Greater Britain. 

After dining at an Italian digger's restaurant with an 
amount of luxury that recalled our feasts at Salt Lake City, I 
started on a stroll, in which I was stopped at once by a shout 
from an ojDen bar-room of " Say ! mister !" Pulling up sharp- 
ly, I was surrounded by an eager crowd, asking from all sides 
the one question : " Might you be Professor MuUer ?" Al- 
though flattered to find that I looked less disreputable and 
rufiianly than I felt, I nevertheless explained as best I could 
that I was no professor — only to be assured that if I was any 
professor at all, Muller or other, I should do just as well: a 
mule was ready for me to ride to the mine, and " Jest kinder 
fix us up about this new lode." If my new-found friends had 
not carried an overwhelming force of pistols, I might have 
gone to the mine as Professor Muller, and given my opinion 
for what it was worth ; as it was, I escaped only by " liquor- 
ing up " over the error. Cases of mistaken identity are not 
always so pleasant in Austin. They told me that, a few weeks 
before, a man riding down the street heard a shot, saw his hat 
fall into the mud, and, picking it u}),- found a small round hole 
on each side. Looking up, he saw a tall miner, revolver smok- 
ing in hand, who smiled grimly, and said : " Guess that's my 
muel." Having politely explained when and where the mule 
was bought, the miner professed himself satisfied with a 
" Guess I was wrong — let's liquor." 

In the course of my walk through Austin, I came upon a 
row of neat huts, each with a board, on which was painted, 
" Sang Sing, washing and ironing," or " Mangling by Ah 
Low." A few paces farther on was a shop painted red, but 
adorned with cabalistic scrawls in black ink ; and farther still 
was a tiny joss-house. Yellow men in spotless clothes of 
dark-green and blue were busy at buying and selling, at cook- 
ing and washing. Some, at a short trot, were carrying burdens 
at the ends of a long bamboo pole. All were quiet, quick, or- 
derly, and clean. I had at last come thoroughly among the 
Chinese peojDle, not to part with them again till I left Geelong, 
or even Suez. 

Returning to the room where I had dined, I parted with 
Pat Bryant, quitting him, in Western fashion, after a good 
" trade " or " swojd." He had taken a fancy to the bigger of 
my two revolvers. He was going to breed cattle in Oregon, 



Nameless Alps. 145 

he told me, and thought it might be useful for shooting his 
wildest beasts by riding in the Indian manner, side by side 
with them, and shooting at the heart. I answered by guessing 
that I " was on the sell ;" and traded the weapon against one 
of his that matched my smaller tool. When I reached Vir- 
ginia City, I inquired prices, and was almost disappointed to 
find that I had not been cheated in the " trade." 

A few minutes after leaving the " hotel " at Austin, and 
calling at the Post-office for the mails, I again found myself in 
the desert — indeed, Austin itself can hardly be styled oasis : 
it may have gold, but it has no green thing within its limits. 
It is in canons and on plains like these, with the skeletons of 
oxen every few yards along the track, that one comes to com- 
prehend the full significance of the terrible entry in the army 
route-books — " No grass, no water." 

Descending a succession of tremendous "grades," as in- 
clines upon roads and railroads are called out West, we came 
on to the lava-covered plain of Reese's River Valley, a wall of 
snowy mountain rising grandly in our front. Close to the 
stream were a ranch or two, and a double camjD of miners and 
of a company of Federal troops. The diggers were playing 
with their glistening knives as diggers only can; the soldiers 
•—their huge sombreros worn loosely on one side — were loung- 
ing idly in the sun. 

Within an hour we were again in snow and ice upon the 
summit of another nameless range. 

This evening, after five sleepless nights, I felt most terribly 
the peculiar form of fatigue that we had experienced after six 
days and nights upon the Plains. Again the brain seemed 
divided into two parts, thinking independently, and one side 
putting questions while the other answered them; but this 
time there was also a sort of half-insanity, a not altogether 
disagreeable wandering of the mind, a replacing of the actual 
by an imagined ideal scene. 

On and on we journeyed, avoiding the Shoshone and West 
Humboldt Mountains, but picking our way along the most 
fearful ledges that it has been my fate to cross, and travers- 
ing from end to end the dreadful Mirage Plains. At night- 
fall we sighted Mount Davidson and the Washoe Range ; at 
3 A.M. I was in bed once more — in Virginia City. 

G 



146 Greater Britain. 



CHAPTER XIX. 

VIRGINIA CITY. 

" Guess the governor's consid'rable skeert." 

" You bet, he's mad." 

My sitting down to breakfast at the same small table seem- 
ed to end the talk; buf I had not been out West for nothing, 
so exiDlaining that I was only four hours in Virginia City, I 
inquired what had occurred to fill the Governor of Nevada 
with vexation and alarm. 

" D'you tell now ! only four hours in this great young city. 
Wall, guess it's a bully business. You see, some time back 
the governor pardoned a road agent after the citizens had 
voted him a roj)e. Yes, sir ! But that ain't all : yesterday, 
cuss me if he didn't refuse ter pardon one of the boys who 
had jess shot another in play like. Guess he thinks hisself 
some pumpkins." I duly expressed my horror, and my in- 
formant went on : " Wall, guess the citizens paid him off pur- 
ty slick. They jess sent him a short, thick bit of rope, with a 
label, 'For his Excellency.' You bet ef he ain't mad — ^you 
bet ! Pass us those molasses, mister." 

I was not disappointed: I had not come to Nevada for 
nothing. To see Virginia City and Carson, since I first heard 
their fame in New York, had been with me a passion, but the 
deed thus told me in the dining-room of the " Empire " Hotel 
was worthy a place in the annals of " Washoe." Under its 
former name, the chief town of Nevada was ranked not only 
the highest, but the " cussedest " town in the States, its citi- 
zens expecting a " dead man for breakfast " every day, and its 
streets ranging from seven to eight thousand feet above the 
sea. Its twofold fame is leaving it : the Coloradan villages of 
North Empire and Black Hawk are nine or ten thousand feet 
above sea-level, and Austin and Virginia City in Montana beat 
it in playful pistolling and vice. Nevertheless, in the point of 
" pure cussedness " old Washoe still stands well, as my first in- 



Virginia City. 147 

troduction to its ways will show. All the talk of Nevada ref- 
ormation applies only to the surface signs : when a miner tells 
you that Washoe. is turning pious, and that he intends short- 
ly to " varmose," he means that, unlike Austin, which is still 
in its first state of mule-stealing and monte, Virginia City has 
passed through the second period — that of " Vigilance Com- 
mittees " and " historic trees " — and is entering the third, the 
stage of churches and " city ofiicers," or j^olice. 

The population is still a shifting one. A by-law of the 
municipality tells us that the " permanent population " consists 
of those who reside more than a month within the city. At 
this moment the miners are pouring into Washoe from north, 
and south, and east, from Montana, from Arizona, and from 
Utah, coming to the gayeties of the largest mining-city to 
spend their money during the fierce, short winter. When I 
saw Virginia City, it was worse than Austin. 

Every other house is a restaurant, a drinking-shop, a gam- 
ing-hell, or worse. With no one to make beds, to mend 
clothes, to cook food — with no house, no home — ^men are al- 
most certain to drink and gamble. The Washoe bar-rooms 
are the most brilliant in the States : as we drove in from Aus- 
tin at 2 A.M., there was blaze enough for us to see from the 
frozen street the portraits of Lola Montez, Ada Menken, Hee- 
nan, and the other Calif ornian celebrities with which the bar- 
rooms were adorned. 

Although "petticoats," even Chinese, are scarce, dancing 
was going on in every house ; but there is a rule in miners' 
balls that prevents all difficulties arismg from an oversupply of 
men : every one who has a patch on the rear portion of his 
breeches does duty for a lady in the dance, and as gentlemen 
are forced by the custom of the place to treat their partners 
at the bar, patches are popular. 

Up to eleven in the morning hardly a man was to be seen: 
a community that sits up all night, begins its work in the 
afternoon. For hours I had the blazing hills called streets to 
myself for meditating ground ; but it did not need hours to 
bring me to think that a Vermonter's description of the cli- 
mate of the mountains was not a bad one when he said : " You 
rise at eight, and shiver in your cloak till nine, when you lay 
it aside, and walk freely in your woolens. At twelve you come 



148 Greater Britain. 

in for your gauze coat and your Panama; at two you are in a 
hammock cursing the heat, but at four you venture out again, 
and by five are in your woolens. At six you begin to shake 
with cold, and shiver on till bed-time, which you make darned 
early." Even at this great height the thermometer in the 
afternoon touches 80° Fahr. in the shade, while from sunset 
to sunrise there is a bitter frost. So it is throughout the Pla- 
teau. When, morning after morning, we reached a ranch, and 
rushed out of the freezing ambulance through the still colder 
outer air to the fragrant cedar fire, there to roll with pain at 
the thawing of our joints, it was hard to bear it in mind that 
by eight o'clock we should be shutting out the sun, and by 
noon melting- even in the deepest shade. 

As I sat at dinner in a miner's restaurant, my opposite 
neighbor, finding that I was not long from England, informed 
me he w^as " the independent editor of the Nevada Union 
GazetteJ^ and went on to ask, " And how might you have left 
literatooral pursoots? How air Tennyson and Thomas T. 
Garlyle ?" I assured him that to the best of my belief they 
were fairly well, to which his reply was, " Guess them ther 
men ken sling ink, they ken." When we parted, he gave me 
a copy of his paper, in which I found that he called a rival 
editor " a walking whisky-bottle " and " a Fenian imp." The 
latter phrase reminded me that of the two or three dozen 
American editors that I had met, this New Englander was 
the first who was " native born." Stenhouse, in Salt Lake 
City, is an Englishman, so is Stanton of Denver, and the 
whole of the remainder of the band were Irishmen. As for 
the earlier assertion in the " editorial," it was not a wild one, 
seeing that Virginia City has five hundred whisky-shops for 
a population of ten thousand. Artemus Ward said of Vir- 
ginia City, in a farewell speech to the inhabitants that should 
have been published in his works, " I never, gentlemen, was 
in a city where I was treated so well^ nor, I will add, so often^'' 
Through every open door the diggers can be seen tossing 
the whisky down their throats with a scowl of resolve, as 
though they were committing suicide — which, indeed, except 
in the point of speed, is probably the case. 

The Union Gazette was not the only paper that I had given 
me to read that morning. Not a bridge over a " crick," not 



ViKGiKiA City. 119 

even a blacked pair of boots, made me so thoroughly aware 
that I had in a measure returned to civilization, as did the 
gift of an Alta California containing a report of a debate 
in the English Parliament upon the Bank Charter Act. The 
speeches were apj)ropriate to my feelings ; I had just return- 
ed not only to civilization, but to the European inconveniences 
of gold and silver money. In Utah, gold and greenbacks cir- 
culate indifferently, with a double set of prices always mark- 
ed and asked ; in Nevada and California, greenbacks are as 
invisible as gold in New York or Kansas. Nothing can per- 
suade the Calif ornians that the adoption by the Eastern States 
of an inconvertible paper system is any thing but the result 
of a conspiracy against the Pacific States — one in which they 
at least are determined to have no share.^ Strongly Unionist 
in feeling as were California, Oregon, and Nevada during the 
rebellion, to have forced greenbacks upon them would have 
been almost more than their loyalty would have borne. In the 
severest taxation they were prepared to acquiesce ; but i^aper- 
money they believed to be downright robbery, and the inven- 
tion of the devil. 

To me the reaching gold once more was far f rOm joleasant, 
for the advantages of paper-money to the traveller are enor- 
mous : it is light, it wears no holes in your pockets, it reveals 
its presence by no untimely clinking; when you jump from a 
coach, every thief within a mile is not at once aware that you 
have ten dollars in your right-hand pocket. The Nevadans 
say that forgeries are so common that their neighbors in Col- 
orado have been forced to agree that any decent imitation 
shall be taken as good, it being too difficult to examine into 
each case. For my part, though in rapid travel a good deal 
of paper passed through my hands in change, my only loss by 
forgery Avas one half-dollar note ; my loss by wear and tear, 
the same. 

In spite of the gold currency, prices are higher in Nevada 
than in Denver. A shave is half a dollar — gold ; in Washoe, 
in Atchison, but a paper quarter. A boot-blacking is fifty 
cents in gold, instead of ten cents paper, as in Chicago or St. 
Louis. 

During the war, when fluctuations in the value of the paper 
were great and sudden, prices changed from day to day. 



150 Greater Britain. 

Hotel proprietors in the West received their guests at break- 
fast, it is said, with " Glorious news ; we've whipped at 

. Gold's 180; board's down half a dollar." While I 

was in the country, gold fluctuated between 140 and 163, but 
prices remained unaltered. 

Paper-money is of some use to a yotmg country in making 
the rate of wages appear enormous, and so attracting immi- 
gration. If a Cork bog-trotter is told that he can get two 
dollars a day for his work in America, but only one in Cana- 
da, no economic considerations interfere to prevent him rush- 
ing to the nominally higher rate. Whether the working-men 
of America have been gainers by the inflation of the curren- 
cy, or the reverse, it is hard to say. It has been stated in the 
Senate that wages have risen sixty per cent., and prices nine- 
ty per cent. ; but " prices " is a term of. great width. The 
men themselves believe that they have not been losers, and no 
argument can be so strong as that. 

My first afternoon upon Mount Davidson I spent under- 
ground in the Gould and Curry mine, the wealthiest and 
largest of those that have tapped the famous Comstock lode. 
In this single vein of silver lies the prosperity not only of the 
city, but of Nevada State ; its discovery will have hastened 
the completion of the overland railway itself by several years. 
It is owing to the enormous yield of this one lode that the 
United States now stands second only to Mexico as a silver- 
producing land. In one year Nevada has given the world as 
much silver as there came from. the mines of all Peru. 

The rise of Nevada has been sudden. I was shown in 
Yii'ginia City a building block of land that reoits for ten times 
what it^cost four years ago. Nothing short of solid silver by 
the yard would have brought twenty thousand men to live 
upon the summit of Mount Davidson. It is easy here to un- 
derstand the mad rush and madder speculation that took 
place at the time of the discovery. Every valley in the 
Washoe Range was "prospected," and pronounced paved 
with silver ; every mountain was a solid mass. " Cities " 
were laid out, and town lots sold, wherever room ^ras afforded 
by a flat piece of ground. The publication of the Californian 
newspapers was suspended, as writers, editors, proprietors, 
and devils, all had gone with the rush. San Francisco went 



YiEGiNiA City. 151 

clean mad, and London and Paris were not far behind. Of 
the hundred " cities " founded, but one was built ; of the 
thousand claims registered, but a hundred were taken up and 
worked ; of the companies formed, but half a dozen ever paid 
a dividend except that obtained from the sale of their plant. 
The silver of which the whole base of Mount Davidson is 
composed has not been traced in the surrounding hills, though 
they are covered with a forest of posts, marking the limits 
of forgotten "claims :" "James Thompson, 130 feet N'.E. by 
]Sr. ;" "Ezra Williams, 130 feet due E. ;" and so for miles. 
The Gould and Curry Company, on the other hand, is said to 
have once paid a larger half-yearly dividend than the sum of 
the original capital, and its shares have been quoted at 1000 
per cent. Such are the differences of a hundred yards. 

One of the oddities of mining-life is that the gold-diggers 
profess a sublime contempt for silver-miners and their trade. 
A Coloradan going West was asked in jtSTevada if in his coun- 
try they could beat the Comstock lode. " Dear, no I" he said. 
"The boys with us are plaguy discouraged jess at present." 
The IN'evadans were down upon the word. " Discouraged, air 
they ?" " Why, yes ! They've jess found they've got ter dig 
through three feet of solid silver 'fore ever they come ter gold." 

Some of the companies have curious titles. " The Union 
Lumber Association " is not bad : but " The Segregated Bel- 
cher Mining Enterprise of Gold Hill District, Story County, 
Nevada State," is far before it as an advertising name. 

In a real " coach " at last — a coach with windows and a 
roof — drawn by six " mustangs," we dashed down Mount 
Davidson upon a real road, engineered with grades and 
bridges — ^^my first since Junction City. Through the Devil's 
Gate we burst out upon a chaotic country. . For a hundred 
miles the eye ranged over humps and bumps of every size 
from stones to mountains, but no level ground, no field, no 
house, no tree, no green. Not even the Sahara so thoroughly 
deserves the name of " desert." In Egypt there is the oasis, in 
Arabia, here and there a date and a sweet- water well ; here 
there is nothing, not even earth. The ground is soda, and 
the water and air are full of salt." 

This road is notorious for the depredations of the "road 
agents," as white highwaymen are politely called, red or yel- 



152 Greater Britain. 

low robbers being still " darned thieves." At Desert Wells 
the coach had been robbed, a week before I passed, by men 
who had first tied up the ranchmen, and taken their places to 
receive the driver and passengers when they arrived. The 
prime object with the robbers is the treasury-box of " dust," 
but they generally " go through " the passengers, by way of 
pastime, after their more regular work is done. As to firing, 
they have a rule — a simjjle one. If a passenger shoots, every 
man is killed. It need not be said that the armed driver and 
armed guard never shoot ; they know their business far too 
well. 

Close here we came on hot and cold springs in close con- 
junction, flowing almost from the same "sink-hole" — the 
original twofold springs, I hinted to our driver, that Poseidon 
planted in the Atlantic isle. He said that " some of that 
name " had a ranch near Carson, so I " concluded " to drop 
Poseidon, lest I should say something that might offend. 

From Desert Wells the alkali grew worse and worse, but 
began to be alleviated at the ranches by irrigation of the 
throat w^ith delicious Californian wine. The plain was strewn 
with erratic boulders, and here and there I noticed sharp sand- 
cones, like those of the Elk Mountain country in Utah. 

At last we dashed into the " city " named after the notori- 
ous Kit Carson, of which an old inhabitant has lately said, 
" This here city is growing plaguy mean : there was only one 
man shot all yesterday." There was what is here styled an 
" altercation " a day or two ago. The sheriff tried to arrest 
a man in broad daylight in the single street which Carson 
boasts. The result was that each fired several shots at the 
other, and that both were badly hurt. 

The half-deserted mining-village and wholly ruined Mor- 
mon settlement stand grimly on the bare rock, surrounded by 
terrible weird-looking depressions of the earth, the far-famed 
" sinks," the very bottom of the Plateau, and goal of all the 
Plateau streams — in summer dry, and spread with sheets of 
salt, in winter filled with brine. The Sierra Nevada rises 
like a wall from the salt-pools, with a fringe of giant leafless 
trees hanging stiffly from its heights — the first forest since I 
left the Missouri bottoms. The trees made me feel that I was 
really across the continent, within reach at least of the fogs of 



Virginia City. 153 

the Pacific — on " the other side ;" that there was still rough, 
cold work to be done, was clear from the great snow-fields 
that showed through the pines with that threatening black- 
ness that the purest of snows wear in the evening when they 
face the east. 

As I gazed upon the tremendous battlements of the Sierra, 
I not only ceased to marvel that for three hundred years traffic 
had gone round by Panama rather than through these fright- 
ful obstacles, but even wondered that they should be sur- 
mounted now. In this hideous valley it was that the Cali- 
fornian immigrants wintered in 1848, and killed their Indian 
guides for food. For three months more the strongest of 
them lived upon the bodies of those who died, incapable, in 
their Weakness, of making good their foothold upon the slip- 
pery snows of the Sierra. After a w^hile, some were cannibals 
by choice ; but the story is not one that can be told. 

Galloping uj) the gentle grades of Johnson's Pass, we be- 
gan the ascent of the last of fifteen great mountain ranges 
crossed or flanked since we had left Salt Lake City. The 
thought recalled a passage of arms that had occurred at Den- 
ver between Dixon and Governor Gilpin. In his grand en- 
thusiastic way, the governor, pointing to the Cordilleras, said, 
" Five hundred snowy ranges lie between this and San Fran- 
cisco." " Peaks," said Dixon. " Ranges !" thundered Gilpin ; 
" I've seen them." 

Of the fifteen greater ranges to tha westward of Salt Lake, 
eight at least are named from the rivers or valleys they con- 
tain, or are wholly nameless. Trade has preceded survey; 
the country is not yet thoroughly explored. " The six paper 
maps by which I travelled — the best and latest — differed in 
essential points. The position and length of the Great Salt 
Lake itself are not yet accurately known ; the height- of Mount 
Hood has been made any thing between nine and twenty 
thousand feet ; the southern boundary-line of Nevada State 
passes through untrodden wilds. A rectification of the limits 
of California and ISTevada was attempted no great time ago; 
the head-waters of some stream which formed a starting-point 
had been found to be erroneously laid down. 

At the flourishing young city of Aurora, in Esmeralda 
County, a court of Califprnia was sitting. A mounted mes- 

G2 




FRIDAY'S STATION — VALLET OF LAKE TAIIOE. 




TEAMING UP THE GRADE AT SLIPPERY FORD, IN THE SIERRA. 



YiRGiNiA City. 155 

senger rode up at a great pace, and, throwing his bridle round 
a stump, dashed in breathlessly, shouting, " What's this here 
court ?" Being told that it was a Californian court, he said, 
" Wall, thet's all wrong : this here's Nevada. We've been 
an' rectified this boundary, an' California's a good ten mile off 
here." "Wall, Mr. Judge, I move this court adjourn," said 
the plaintiff's counsel. " How can a court adjourn thet's not 
a court ?" replied the judge. " Guess I'll go." And off he 
went. So, if the court of Aurora was a court, it must be sit- 
ting now. 

The coaching on this line is, beyond comparison, the best 
the world can show. Drawn hj six half-bred mustangs, 
driven by whips of the fame of the Hank Monk " who drove 
Greeley," the mails and passengers have been conveyed from 
Virginia City to the rail at Placer ville, 154 miles, in 15 hours 
and 20 minutes, including a stoppage of half an hour for sup- 
per, and sixteen shorter stays to change horses. In this dis- 
tance the Sierra Nevada has to be traversed by a rapid rise 
of three thousand feet, a fall of a thousand feet, another rise 
of the same, and then a descent of five thousand feet on the 
Californian side. 

Before the road was made, the passage was one of extraordi- 
nary difficulty. A wagon once started, they say, from Folsom, 
bearing " Carson or bust " in large letters upon the tilt. Aft- 
er ten days it returned lamely enough, with four of the twelve 
oxen gone, and bearing the label " Busted." 

When we were nearing Hank Monk's "piece," I became 
impatient to see the hero of the famous ride. What was my 
disgust when the driver of the earlier portion of the road ap- 
peared again upon the box in charge of six magnificent iron- 
grays. The peremptory cry of "All aboardi'-' brought me 
without remonstrance to the coach, but I took care to get 
upon the box, although, as we were starting before the break 
of day, the frost was. terrible. To my relief, when I inquired 
after Hank, the driver said that he was at a ball at a timber- 
ranch in the forest " six miles on." At early light we reach- 
ed the spot — the summit of the more eastern of the twin 
ranges of the Sierra. Out came Hank, amid the cheers of the 
half-dozen men and women of the timber-ranch who formed 
the "ball," wrapped up to the eyes in furs, and took the reins 



156 Geeater Britain. 

without a word. For miles he drove steadily and moodily 
along. I knew these drivers too well to venture upon speak- 
ing first when they were in the sulks ; at last, however, I lost 
all patience, and silently ofEered him a cigar. He took it 
without thanking me, but after a few minutes said, " Thet last 
driver, how did he drive?" I made some shuffling answer, 
when he cut in, " Drove as ef he were skeert ; and so he was. 
Look at them mustangs. Yoo — ou!" As he yelled, the 
horses started at what out here they style " the run ;" and 
when, after ten minutes, he pulled up, we must have done 
three miles, round most violent and narrow turns, with only 
the bare precipice at the side, and a fall of often a hundred 
feet to the stream at the bottom of the ravine — the Simplon 
without its wall. Dropping into the talking mood, he asked 
me the usual questions as to my business, and whither I was 
bound. When I told him I thought of visiting Australia, he 
said, " D'you tell now ! Jess give my love — at Bendigo — to 
Gumption Dick." Not another word about Australia or 
Gumption Dick could I draw from him. I asked at Bendigo 
for Dick ; but not even the officer in command of the police 
had ever heard of Hank Monk's friend. 

The sun rose as we dashed through the grand landscapes 
of Lake Tahoe. On we went, through gloomy snow-drifts and 
still sadder forests of gigantic pines nearly three hundred feet 
in height, and down the canon of the American River from the 
second range. Suddenly we left the snows, and burst through 
the pine woods into an open scene. From gloom there was a 
change to light ; from sombre green to glowing red and gold. 
The trees, no longer hung with icicles, were draped with Span- 
ish moss. In ten yards we had come from winter into sum- 
mer. Alkali was left behind forever ; we were in El Dorado, 
on the Pacific shores — in sunny, dreamy California. 



CHAPTER XX. 

EL DORADO. 

The city of the high-priest, clothed in robes of gold, figures 
largely in the story of Spanish discovery in America. The 
hardy soldiers who crossed the Atlantic in caravels and cock- 



El Dorado. 157 

boats, and toiled iu leathern doublets and plate annor through 
the jungle-swamp of Panama, were lured on through years of 
plague and famine by the dream of a country whose rivers 
flowed with gold. Diego de Mendoza found the land in 1532, 
but it was not till January, 1848, that James Marshall washed 
the golden sands of El Dorado. 

The Spaniards were not the first to place the earthly para- 
dise in America, l^ot to speak of 'New Atlantis, the Cana- 
dian Indians have never ceased to hand down to their sons a 
legend of Western abodes of bliss, to which their souls journey 
after death, through frightful glens and forests. In their 
mystic chants they describe minutely the obstacles over which 
the souls must toil to reach the regions of perpetual spring. 
These stories are no mere dreams, but records of the great 
Indian migration from the West : the liquid-eyed Hurons, 
not sprung from the Canadian snows, may be Calif ornian if 
they are not Malay, the Pacific shores their happy hunting- 
ground, the climate of Los Angeles their never-ending spring. 

The names The Golden State and El Dorado are doubly 
applicable to California; her light and landscape, as well as 
her soil, are golden. Here, on the Pacific side, !N"ature wears 
a robe of deep rich yellow : even the distant hills, no longer 
purple, are wrapped in golden haze. IsTo more cliffs and 
canons — all is rounded, soft, and warm. The Sierra, which 
faces eastward, with four thousand feet of wall-Hke rock, on 
the west descends gently in vine-clad slopes into the Califor- 
nian vales, and trends away in spurs toward the sea. The 
scenery of the N'evada side was weird, but these western foot- 
hills are unlike any thing in the world. Drake, who never left 
the Pacific shores, named the country New Albion, from the 
whiteness of a headland on the coast ; but the first viceroys 
were less ridiculously misled by patriotic vanity when they 
christened it New Spain. 

In the warm, dry sunlight, we rolled down hills of rich, red 
loam, and through forests of noble redwood — the jSequoia 
sempervirens, brother to the Sequoia gigantea, or Wellingto- 
nia of our lawns. Dashing at full gallop through the Ameri- 
can River just below its falls, where, in 1848, the Mormons 
first dug that Californian gold which in the interests of their 
Church they had better have let alone, we came upon great 




VIEW ON THE AMERICAN RIVER— THE PLACE WHERE GOLD WAS FIRST FOUND. 



El Dorado. 159 

gangs of Indians working by proxy upon the continental rail- 
road. The Indian's plan for living happily is a simple one : 
he sits and smokes in silence while his women work, and he 
thus lives upon the earnings of the squaws. Unlike a Mor- 
mon patriarch, he contrives that polygamy shall pay, and says 
with the 'New Zealand Maori, "A man with one wife may 
starve, but a man with many wives grows fat." These fel- 
lows were Shoshones from the other side of the Plateau ; for 
the Pacific Indians, who are black, not red, will not even force 
their wives to work, which, in the opinion of the Western men, 
is the ultimate form of degradation in a race. Higher up the 
hills Chinamen alone are employed ; but their labor is too 
costly to be thrown away upon the easier work. 

In El Dorado City we staid not long enough for the ex- 
ploration of the once famous surface gold mines, now forming 
one long vineyard, but, rolling on, were soon among the tents 
of Placerville, which had been swept with fire a few months 
before. All these valley diggings have been deserted for 
deep-sinking; not that they are exhausted yet, but that the 
yield has ceased to be sufficient to tempt the gambling digger. 
The men who lived in Placerville, and made it infamous 
throughout the world some years ago, are scattered now 
through N^evada, Arizona, Montana, and the Frazer country, 
and Chinamen and Digger Indians have the old workings to 
themselves, settling their rights as against each other by daily 
battle and perpetual feud. The Digger Indians are the most 
degraded of all the aborigines of North America — outcasts 
from the other tribes — men under a ban — "tapu," as their 
Maori cousins say — weaponless, naked savages, who live on 
roots, and pester the industrious Chinese. 

It is not with all their foes that the yellow men can cope 
so easily. In a tiny Chinese theatre in their camp near Pla- 
cerville I saw a farce which to the remainder of the audience 
was no doubt a very solemn drama, in which the adventures 
of two Celestials on the diggings were given to the world. 
The only scene in which the pantomime was sufficiently clear 
for me to read it without the possibility of error was one in 
which a white man — " Melican man" — came to ask for taxes. 
The Chinamen had paid their taxes once before, but the fellow 
said that didn't matter. The yellow men consulted together. 



160 Greater Britain. 

and at last agreed that the stranger was a humbug, so the play- 
ended with a big fight, in which they drove him off their 
ground. A Chinaman played the over-'cute Yankee, and did 
it well. 

Perhaps the tax-collectors in the remoter districts of the 
States count on the Chinese to make up the deficiencies in 
their accounts caused by the non-payment of their taxes by 
the whites ; for even in these days of comparative quiet and 
civilization, taxes are not gathered to their full amount in any 
of the Territories, and the justice of the collector is in Montana 
tempered by many a threat of instant lynching if he proceeds 
with his assessment. Even in Utah the returns are far from 
satisfactory : the three great merchants of Salt Lake City 
should, if their incomes are correctly stated, contribute a heav- 
ier sum than that returned for the whole of the population of 
the Territory. 

The white diggers who preceded the Chinese have left their 
traces in the names of lodes and places. There is no town, 
indeed, in California with such a title as the Coloradan city 
of Buckskin Joe, but Yankee Jim comes near it. Placerville 
itself was formerly known as Hangtown, on account of its. be- 
ing the city in which lynch-law was inaugurated. Dead-shot 
Flat is not far from here, and within easy distance are Hell's 
Delight, Jackass Gulch, and Loafer's Hill. The once famous 
Plug-ugly Gulch has now another name ; but of Chuckle-head 
Diggings and Puppytown I could not find the whereabouts in 
my walks and rides. Grave-yard Canon, Gospel Gulch, and 
Paint-pot HiU are other Californian names. It is to be hoped 
that the English and Spanish names will live unmutilated in 
California and Nevada, to hand down, in liquid syllables, the 
history of a half-forgotten conquest, an already perished race. 
San Francisco has become " Fr'isco " in speech if not on paper, 
and Sacramento will hardly bear the wear and tear of Califor- 
nian life ; but the use of the Spanish tongue has spread among 
the Americans who have dealings with the Mexican country- 
folk of California State, and, except in mining districts, the lo- 
cal names will stand. 

It is not places only that have strange designations in 
America. Out of the Puritan fashion of naming children 
from the Old Testament patriarchs has grown, by a sort of 



El Dorado. 161 

recoil, the custom of following the heroes of the classics, and 
when they fail, inventing strange titles for children. Mahonri 
Cahoon lives in Salt Lake City ; Attila Harding was secretary 
to one of the governors of Utah; Michigan University has 
for president Erastus Haven; for superintendent, Oramel 
Hosford ; for professors, Abrana Sanger, Silas Douglas, Moses 
Gunn, Zina Pitcher, Alonzo Pitman, De Volson Wood, Lu- 
cius Chapin, and Corydon Ford. Luman Stevens, Bolivar 
Barnum, Wyllys Ransom, Ozora Stearns, and Buel Derby 
were Michigan officers during the war, and Epaphroditus Ran- 
som was formerly governor of the State. Thereon Rockwell, 
Gershon Weston, and Bela Kellogg, are well-known politicians 
in Massachusetts, and Colonel Liberty Billings is equally prom- 
inent in Florida. In New England school-lists it is hard to 
pick boys from girls. Who shall tell the sex of Lois Lombard, 
Asahel Morton, Ginery French, Royal Miller, Thankful Poyne ? 
A Chicago man who was lynched in Central Illinois while I 
was in the neighborhood was named Alonza Tibbets. Elipha- 
let Arnould and Velenus Sherman are ranchmen on the over- 
land road ; Sereno Burt is an editor in Montana ; Persis Boyn- 
ton, a merchant in Chicago. Zelotes Terry, Datus Damer, 
Zeryiah Rainforth, Barzellai Stanton, Sardis Clark, Ozias 
Williams, Xenas Phelps, Converse Hopkins, and Hirodshai 
Blake, are names with which I have met. Zilpha, Huldah, 
IsTabby, Basetha, Minnesota, and Semantha, are l^ew England 
ladies; while one gentleman of Springfield, lately married, 
caught a Tartia. One of the earliest enemies of the Mormons 
was Palatiah Allen; one of their first converts. Preserved 
Harris. Taking the pedigree of Joe Smith, the Mormon 
prophet, as that of a representative New England family, we 
shall find that his aunts were Lovisa and Lovina Mack, Dolly 
Smith, Eunice and Miranda Pearce ; his uncles. Royal, Ira, 
and Bushrod Smith. His grandfather's name was Asael ; of 
his great-aunts, one was Hej)hzibah, another Hypsebeth, and 
another, Yasta. The prophet's eldest brother's name was Al- 
vin ; his youngest, Don Carlos ; his sister, Sophronia ; and his 
sister-in-law, Jerusha Smith ; while a nephew was christened 
Chilon. One of the nieces was Levira, and another, Rizpah. 
The first wife of George A. Smith, the prophet's cousin, is 
Bathsheba, and his eldest daughter also bears this name. 



162 Greater Britain. 

In the smaller towns near PlacerviUe there is still a wide 
field for the discovery of character as well as gold ; but eccen- 
tricity among the diggers here seems chiefly to waste itself on 
food. The luxury of this Pacific country is amazing. The 
restaurants and cafes of each petty digging-town put forth 
bills of fare Avhich the " Trois Freres " could not equal for in- 
genuity ; wine lists such as Delmonico's can not beat. The 
facilities are great : except in the far interior or on the hills, 
one even spring reigns unchangeably — summer in all except 
the heat ; every fruit and vegetable of the world is perpetual- 
ly in season. Fruit is not named in the hotel bills of fare, but 
all the day long there are piled in strange confusion on the 
tables Mission grapes, the Calif ornian Bar tie t pears, Empire 
apples from Oregon, melons — ^English, Spanish, American, and 
musk ; peaches, nectarines, and fresh almonds. All comers 
may help themselves, and wash down the fruit with excellent 
Calif ornian-made Sauterne. If dancing, gambling, drinking, 
and still shorter cuts to the devil have their votaries amonoj 
the diggers, there is no employment. upon which they so free- 
ly spend their cash as on dishes cunningly prepared by cooks 
— Chinese, Italian, Bordelais — who follow every " rush." Aft- 
er the doctor and the coroner, no one makes money at the dig- 
gings like the cook. The dishes smell of the Calif ornian soil ; 
baked rock-cod a la Buena Vista, broiled Calif ornian quail, mth 
Russian River bacon, Sacramento snipes on toast, Oregon ham, 
with champagne sauce, and a dozen other toothsome things — 
these w^ere the dishes on the PlacerviUe bill of fare in a hotel 
which had escaped the fire, but w^hose only guests were dig- 
gers and their friends. A few Atlantic States dishes were 
down upon the list : hominy, cod chowder — hardly equal, I 
fear, to that of Salem — sassafras candy, and squash tart, but 
never a mention of pork and molasses, dear to the Massachu- 
setts boy. AH these good things the diggers, when " dirt is 
plenty," moisten with Clicquot or Heidsick cabinet ; when re- 
turns are small, with their excellent Sonoma wine. 

Even earthquakes fail to interrupt the triumphs of the 
cooks. The last "bad shake" was fourteen days ago, but it. 
is forgotten in the joy called forth by the discovery of a thir- 
teenth way to cook fresh oysters, which are brought here from 
the coast by train. There is still a something in Placerville 



El Dorado, 163 

that smacks of the time when tin-tacks were selling for their 
weight in gold. 

Wandering through the single remaining street of Placer- 
ville before I left for the Southern country, I saw that grapes 
were marked " three cents a pound ;" but as the lowest coin 
known on th^ Pacific shores is the ten-cent bit, the price exists 
but upon paper. Three pounds of grapes, however, for "-a 
bit " is a practicable purchase, in which I indulged when start- 
ing on my journey South : in the towns you have always the 
hotel supply. If the value of the smallest coin be a test of the 
prosperity of a country, California must stand high. Not only 
is nothing less than the bit, or fivepence, known, but when five- 
, pence is deducted from a " quarter," or shilling, fivepence is 
all you get or give for change — a gain or loss upon which Cal- 
ifornian shopkeepers look with profound indifference. 

Hearing a greater jingling of glasses from one bar-room 
than from all the other hundred whisky-shops of Placerville, I 
turned into it to seek the cause, and found a Vermonter lect- 
uring on Lincoln and the war to an audience of some fifty dig- 
gerSi The lecturer and bar-keeper stood together within the 
sacred inclosure, the one mixing his drinks, while the other 
rounded off his periods in the inflated Western style. The 
audience were critical and cold till near the close of the ora- 
tion, when the " corpse -revivers " they were drinking seemed 
to take effect, and to be at the bottom of the stentorian shout 
" Thet's bully," with which the peroration was rewarded. The 
Vermonter told me that he had come round from Panama, 
and was on his way to Austin, as Placerville was " played out " 
since its " claims " had " fizzled." 

They have no lecture-room here at present, as it seems ; but 
that there are churches, however small, appears from a para- 
graph in the Placerville news-sheet of to-day, which chronicles 
the removal of a Methodist meeting-house from Block A to 
Block C, vice a Catholic chapel retired, " having obtained a 
superior location." 

A few days were all that I could spend in the valleys that 
lie between the Sierra Contra Costa range, basking in a rich 
sunlight, and unsurpassed in the world for climate, scenery, 
and soil. This single State — one of forty-five — has twice the 
area of Great Britain, the most fertile of known soils, and the 



164 



Greater Britain. 



sun and sea-breeze of Greece. Western rhapsodies are the 
expression of the intoxication produced by such a spectacle, 
but they are outdone by facts. 

For mere charm to the eye, it is hard to give the palm be- 
tween the cracks and canons of the Sierra and the softer vales 
of the coast range, where the hot sun is tempered by the cool 
Pacific breeze, and thunder and lightning are unknown. 

Coming from the wilds of the Carson Desert and of Mirage 




THE BRIDAL VEIL FALL, TOSEMITE VALLEY. 

Plains, the more sensuous beauty of the lower dells has for the 
eye the relief that travellers from the coast must seek in the 
loftier heights and precipices of the Yosemite. The oak-filled 
valleys of the Contra Costa range have all the pensive repose 



El Dokado. 165 

of the sheltered vales that lie between the Apennines and the 
Adriatic from Rimini to Ancona; but California has the ad- 
vantage in her skies. Italy has the blue, but not the golden 
haze. 

Nothing can be more singular than the variety of beauty 
that lies hid in these Pacific slopes ; all that is best in Canada 
and the Eastern States finds more than its equal here. The 
terrible grandeur of Cape Trinite, on the Saguenay, and the 
panorama of loveliness from the terrace at Quebec, are alike 
outdone. 

Americans certainly need not go to Europe to find scen- 
ery ; but neither need they go to California, or even Colorado. 
Those who tell us that there is no such thing as natural beauty 
west of the Atlantic can scarcely know the Eastern, while 
they ignore the Western and Central States. The world can 
show few scenes more winning than Israel's River Valley, in 
the White Mountains of ISTew Hampshire, or ISTorth Conway, 
in the southern slopes of the same range. lS"othing can be 
more full of grandeur than the passage of the James at Bal- 
cony Falls, where the river rushes through a crack in the 
AjDpalachian chain ; the wilderness of iN'orthern N'ew York is 
unequalled of its kind, and there are delicious landscapes in 
the Adirondacks. As for river scenery, the Hudson is 
grander than the Rhine ; the Susquehanna is lovelier than the 
Meuse ; the Schuylkill prettier than the Seine ; the Mohawk 
more enchanting than the Dart. Of the rivers of North 
Europe, the Neckar alone is not beaten in the States. 

Americans admit that their scenery is fine, but pretend 
that it is wholly wanting in the interest that historic memories 
bestow. So-called republicans affect to find a charm in Bishop 
Hatto's Tower which is wanting in Irving's " Sunnyside ;" the 
ten thousand virgins of Cologne live in their fancy, while 
Constitution Island and Fort Washington are forgotten 
names. 'Americans or Britishers, we Saxons are all alike — a 
wandering, discontented race ; we go 4000 miles to find Sleepy 
Hollow, or Killian Yan Rensselaer's Castle, or Hiawatha's 
great red pipe-stone quarry ; and the Americans who live in 
the castle, picnic yearly in the Hollow, and flood the quarry 
for a skating-rink, come here to England to visit Burns's house 
or to sit in Pope's arm-chair. 



166 Greater Britain. 

Down South I saw clearly the truth of a thought that 
struck me before I had been ten minutes west of the Sierra 
Pass. California is Saxon only in the looks and language of 
the people of its towns. In Pennsylvania you may sometimes 
fancy yourself in Sussex; while in New England you seem 
only to be in some part of Europe that you have never hap- 
pened to light ujDon before, in California you are at last in a 
new world. The hills are weirdly peaked or flattened, the 
skies are new, the birds and plants are new ; the atmosphere, 
crisp though warm, is unlike any in the world but that of 
South Australia. It will be strange if the Pacific coast does 
not produce a new school of Saxon poets — painters it has al- 
ready given. 

Returning to Placerville after an eventless exploration of 
the exquisite scenery to the south, I took the railway once 
again, the first time since I had left Manhattan City, 1800 
miles away, and was soon in Sacramento, the State capital, now 
recovering slowly from the flood of 1862. Kear the city I 
made out Oak Grove — famed for duels between well-known 
Californians. Here it was that General Denver, State sena- 
tor, shot Mr. Gilbert, the representative in Congress, in a 
duel fought with rifles. Here, too, it was that Mr. Thomas, 
district attorney for Placer County, killed Dr. Dickson, of the 
Marine Hospital, in a duel with pistols in 1854. Records of 
duels form a serious part of the State history. At Lone 
Mountain Cemetery at San Francisco there is a great marble 
monument to the Hon. David Broderick, shot by Chief -justice 
Terry, of the Supreme Court, in 1859. 

A few hours' quiet steaming in the sunlight down the 
Sacramento River, past Rio Vista and Montezuma, through 
the gap in the Contra Costa range, at which the grand volcanic 
peak of Monte Diablo stands sentinel, watching over the 
Martinez Straits, and there opened to the south and Avest a 
vast mountain-surrounded bay. Volumes of cloud were roll- 
ing in unceasingly fi*om the ocean through the Golden Gate, 
past the fortified Island of Alcatras, and spending themselves 
in the opposite shores of San Rafael, Benicia, and Vallejo. 
At last I was across the continent, and face to face with the 
Pacific. 



Lynch -Law. 167 



CHAPTER XXI. 

LY]SrCH-LAW. 

'^ CALTFOENiAisrs are called the scum of the earth, yet their 
great city is the best policed in the world," said a ISTew York 
friend to me, when he heard that I thought of crossing the 
continent to San Francisco. 

" Them ISTew Yorkers is a sisjht too fond of lookinsr after 
other people's morals," replied an old " Forty-niner," to whom 
I repeated this phrase, having first toned it down, however. 
" Still," he went on, " our history's baddish, but it ain't for us 
to play showman to our own worst pints : let every man skin 
his own skunk !" 

The story of the early days of San Francisco, as to which 
my curiosity was thus excited, is so curious an instance of the 
development of an English community under the most inau- 
spicious circumstances, that the whole time which I spent in 
the city itself I devoted to hearing the tale from those who 
knew the actors. Not only is the history of the two Vigilance 
Committees in itself characteristic, but it works in with what 
I had gathered in Kansas, and Illinois, and Colorado as to the 
ojDeration of the claim-clubs ; and the stories, taken together, 
form a typical picture of the rise of a IN'ew English country. 

The discovery of gold in 1848 brought down on luckless 
California the idle, the reckless, the vagabonds,, first of Poly- 
nesia, then of all the world. Street fighting, public gaming, 
masked balls given by unknown women, and paid for nobody 
knew how, but attended by governor, supervisors, and alcalde 
— all these were minor matters by the side of the general un- 
defined ruffianism of the place. Before the end of 1849, San 
Francisco presented on a gigantic scale much the same ap- 
pearance that Helena, in Montana, wears in 1866. 

Desperadoes poured in from all sides, the best of the bad 
flocking off to the mines, while the worst among the villains 
— those who lacked energy as well as moral sense — remained 
in the city, to raise by thieving or in the gambling-booth the 



168 Greatek Britain. 

" pile " that they were too indolent to earn by pick and pan. 
Hundreds of " emancipists " from Sydney, " old lags " from 
Norfolk Island, the pick of the criminals of England, still 
further trained and confirmed in vice and crime by the expe- 
riences of Macquarie Harbor and Port Arthur, rushed to San 
Francisco to continue a career which the vigilance of the con- 
vict police made hopeless in Tasmania and New South Wales. 
The floating vice of the Pacific ports of South America soon 
gathered to a spot where there were not only men to fleece, 
but men who, being fleeced, could pay. The police were nec- 
essarily few, for, appoint a man to-day, and to-morrow he was 
gone to the Placers with some new friend ; those who could 
be prevailed upon to remain a fortnight in the force were ac- 
cessible to bribes from the men they were set to watch. They 
themselves admitted their inaction, but ascribed it to the con- 
tinual change of place among the criminals, which prevented 
the slightest knowledge of their characters and haunts. The 
Australian jail-birds formed a quarter known as " Sydney 
Town," which soon became what the Bay of Islands had been 
ten years before — the Alsatia of the Pacific. In spite of daily 
murders, not a single criminal was hanged. 

The ruffians did not all agree : there were jealousies among 
the various bands ; feuds between the Australians and Chili- 
ans; between the- Mexicans and the New Yorkers. Under 
the various names of " Hounds," " Regulators," " Sydney 
Ducks," and " Sydney Coves," the English convict-party or- 
ganized themselves in opposition to the Chilenos, as well as 
to the police and law-abiding citizens. Gangs of villains, 
whose sole bo^d of union was robbery or murder, marched, 
armed with bludgeons and revolvers, every Sunday afternoon, 
to the sound of music, unhindered through the streets, pro- 
fessing that they were " guardians of the community " against 
the Spaniards, Mexicans, and South Americans. 

At last a movement took place among the merchants and 
reputable inhabitants which resulted in the break-up of the 
Australian gangs. By an uprising of the American citizens 
of San Francisco, in res2:>onse to a proclamation by T. M. 
Leavenworth, the alcalde, twenty of the most notorious among 
the "Hounds" were seized and shipped to China: it is be- 
lieved that some were taken south in irons and landed near 



Lynch-Law. 169 

Cape Horn. "Anywhere, so that they could not come back," 
as my informant said. 

For a webk or two things went well, but a fresh inpour of 
rogues and villains soon swamped the volunteer police by sheer 
force of numbers; and in Fe'bruary, 1851, occurred an in- 
stance of united action among the citizens, which is noticeable 
as the forerunner of the Vigilance Committees. A Mr. Jansen 
had been stunned by a blow from a slung-shot, and his person 
and premises rifled by Australian thieves. During the exam- 
ination of two prisoners arrested on suspicion, five thousand cit- 
izens gathered round the City Hall, and handbills were circu- 
lated, in which it was proposed that the prisoners should be 
lynched. In the afternoon an attempt to seize the men was 
made, but repulsed by another section of the citizens — the 
Washington Guard. A meeting was held on the Plaza, and 
a committee appointed to watch the authorities, and prevent a 
release. A well-known citizen, Mr. Brannan, made a speech, 
in which he said : " We, the people, are the mayor, the record- 
er, and the laws." The alcalde addressed the crowd, and sug- 
gested, by way of compromise, that they should elect a jury, 
which should sit in the regular court and try the prisoners. 
This was refused, and the people elected not only a jury, but 
three judges, a sheriff, a clerk, a public prosecutor, and two 
council for the defense. This court then tried the prisoners 
in their absence, and the jury failed to agree — nine were for 
conviction, and three were doubtful. " Hang 'em anyhow ; 
majority rules," was the shout, but the popular judges stood 
firm, and discharged their jury, while the people acquiesced. 
The next day the prisoners were tried and convicted by the 
regular court, although they were ultimately found to be in- 
nocent men. 

Matters now went from bad to worse : five times San Fran- 
cisco was swept from end to end by fires known to have been 
helped on, if not originally kindled, by incendiaries in the hope 
of plunder; and when, by the fires of May and June, 1851, 
hardly a house was left untouched, the pious Bostonians held 
up theu' hands, and cried " Gomorrah !" 

Immediately after the discovery that the June fire was not 
accidental, the Vigilance Committee was formed, being self- 
appointed, and consisting of the foremost merchants in the 

H 



170 Greater Britain. 

place. This was on the 'Tth of June, according to my friend ; 
on the 9th, according to the Californian histories. It was 
rumored that the Committee consisted of two hundred citi- 
zens ; it was known that they were supported by the whole of 
the city press. They published a declaration, in which they 
stated that there is " no security for life or property under 
the . . . law as now administered." This they ascribed to the 
" quibbles of the law," the " corrugation of the police," the 
" insecurity of prisons," the " laxity of those who pretend to 
administer justice." The secret instructions of the Commit- 
tee contain a direction that the members shall at once assem- 
ble at the committee-room whenever signals consisting of two 
taps on a bell are heard at intervals of one minute. The 
Committee was organized with President, Vice-president, 
Secretary, Treasurer, Sergeant-at-arms, Standing Committee 
on Qualifications, and Standing Committee of Finance. Xo one 
was to be admitted a member unless he were " a respectable 
citizen, and approved by the Committee on Qualifications." 

The very night of their organization, according to the his- 
tories, or three nights later, according to my friend Mr. 

A , the work of the Committee began. Some boatmen at 

Central Wharf saw something which led them to follow out 
into the Yerba Buena cove a man, whom they captured after 
a sharp row. As they overhauled him, he threw overboard a 
safe, just stolen from a bank, but this was soon fished out. 
He was at once carried off to the committee-room of the Vig- 
ilants, and the bell of the Monumental Engine Company struck 
at intervals, as the rule prescribed. Not only the Committee, 
but a vast surging croAvd collected, although midnight was 

now past. A was on the Plaza, and says that every man 

was armed, and evidently disposed to back up the Committee. 
According to the AUa California, the chief of the police came 
up a little before 1 a.m., and tried to force an entrance to the 
room ; but he was met, politely enough, with a show of re- 
volvers sufficient to annihilate his men, so he judged it pru- 
dent to retreat. 

At one o'clock the bell of the engine-house began to toll, 
and the crowd became excited. Mr. Brannan came out of the 
committee-room, and, standing on a mound of sand, addressed 
the citizens. As well as my friend could remember, his words 



Lynch- Law. 171 

were these : " Gentlemen, the man — Jenkins by name — a Syd- 
ney convict, whose supposed offense you know, has had a fair 
trial before eighty gentlemen, and been unanimously found 
guilty by them. I have been deputed by the Committee to 
ask whether it is your pleasure that he be hanged." " Ay !" 
from every man in the crowd. " He will be given an hour to 
prepare for death, and the Rev. Mr. Mines has been already 
sent for to minister to him. Is this your pleasure ?" Again 
a storm of " Ay !" Nothing was known in the crowd of the 
details of the trial, except that counsel had been heard on the 
prisoner's behalf. For another hour the excitement of the 
crowd was permitted to continue, but at two o'clock the doors 
of the committee-room were thrown open, and Jenkins was 

seen smoking a cigar. Mr. A said that he did not believe 

the prisoner expected a rescue, but thought that an exhibition 
of pluck might make him popular with the crowd, and save 
him. A procession of Yigilants mth drawn Colts was then 
formed, and set off in the moonlight across the four chief 
streets to the Plaza. Some of the people shouted " To the 
flag-staff !" but there came a cry, " Don't desecrate the Lib- 
erty pole. To the old adobe ! the old adobe !" and to the old 
adobe custom-house the prisoner was dragged. In five min- 
utes he was hanging from the roof, three hundred citizens 

lending a hand at the rope. At six in the morning A 

went home, but he heard that the police cut down the body 
about that time, and carried it to the coroner's house. 

An inquest was held next day. The city officers swore 
that they had done all they could to prevent the execution, 
but they refused to give up the names of the Vigilance Com- 
mittee. The members themselves were less cautious. Mr. 
Brannan and others came forward of their own proper motion, 
and disclosed all the circumstances of the trial. One hundred 
and forty of the Committee backed them up by a written prot- 
estation against interference with the Yigilants, to which their 
signatures were appended. Protest and evidence have been 
published, not only in the newspapers of the time, but in tj^e 
San Francisco " Annals." The coroner's jury found a verdict 
of " Strangulation, consequent on the concerted action of a body 
of citizens calling themselves a Committee of Vigilance." An 
hour after the verdict was given, a mass meeting of the whole 



172 Greater Britain. 

of the respectable inhabitants was held in the Plaza, and a 
resolution approving of the action of the Committee passed by 
acclamation. 

In July, 1851, the Committee hanged another man on the 
Market Street wharf, and appointed a sub-committee of thirty 
to board every ship that crossed the bar, seize all persons sus- 
pected of being " Sydney coves," and reship them to New 
South Wales. 

In August came the great struggle between the Vigilants 
and constituted authority. It was sharp and decisive. Whit- 
taker and M'Kenzie, two " Sydney coves," were arrested by 
the Committee for various crimes, and sentenced to death. 
The next day Sheriff Hayes seized them, on a writ of habeas 
corpus, in the rooms of the Committee. The bell was tolled, 
the citizens assembled, the Vigilants told their story, the men 
were seized once more, and by noon they were hanging from 
the loft of the committee-house by the ordinary lifting-tackle 
for heavy goods. Fifteen thousand people were present, and 
approved. " After this," said A — ^ — , '" there could be no 
mistake about the citizens supporting the Committee." 

By September the Vigilants had transported all the "coves" 
on whom they could lay hands ; so they issued a proclamation, 
declaring that for the future they would confine themselves to 
aiding the law by tracing out and guarding criminals ; and in 
pursuance of their decision, they soon afterward helped the 
authorities in preventing the lynching of a ship-captain for cru- 
elty to his men. 

After the great sweep of 1 85 1, things became steadily worse 
again till they culminated in 1855 — a year to which my friend 
looked back with horror. Not counting Indians, there were 
four "hundred persons died by violence in California in that sin- 
gle year. Fifty of these were lynched, a dozen were hanged 
>y law, a couple of dozen shot by the sheri:ffs and tax-collect- 
ors in the course of their duty. The ofiicers did not escape 
scot-free. The under-sheriff of San Francisco was shot in 
fission Street in broad daylight by a man upon whom he 
was trying to execute a writ of ejectment. 

Judges, mayors, supervisors, politicians, all were bad alike. 
The merchants of the city were from New England, New 
York, and foreign lands ; but the men who assumed the di- 



Lynch -Law. 173 

rection of public affairs, and especially of public funds, were 
Southerners, many of them " Border Ruffians " of the most 
savage stamp — " Pikes," as they were called, from Pike 
County, in Missouri, from which their leaders came. Instead 
of banding themselves together to oppose the laws, these 
rogues and ruffians found it easier to control the making of 
them. Their favorite method of defeating their New England 
foes was by the simple plan of " stuffing," or filling the ballot- 
box with forged tickets when the elections were concluded. 
Two Irishmen — Casey and Sullivan — were their tools in this 
shameful work. Werth, a Southerner, the leader of Casey's 
gang, had been denounced in the San Francisco Bulletin as 
the murderer of a man named Kittering ; and Casey, meeting 
James King, editor of the Bulletin, shot him dead in Mont- 
gomery Street in the middle of the day. Casey and one of 
his assistants — a man named Cora — were hanged by the peo- 
ple as Mr. King's body was being carried to the grave, and 
Sullivan committed suicide the same day. 

Books were opened for the enrollment of the names of 
those who were prepared to support the Committee : nine thou- 
sand grown white males inscribed themselves within four days. 
Governor Johnson at once declared that he should suppress 
the Committee, but the city of Sacramento prevented this 
course by offering a thousand men for the Yigilants' support, 
the other Californian cities following suit. The Committee 
got together 6000 stand of arms and thirty cannon, and for- 
tified their rooms with earth-works and barricades. The gov- 
ernor, having called on the general commanding the Federal 
forces at Benicia, who wisely refused to interfere, marched 
upon the city, was surrounded, and taken prisoner, with all 
his forces, without the striking of a blaw. 

Having now obtained the control of the State government, 
the Committee proceeded to banish all the " Pikes " and 
" Pukes." Four were hanged, forty transported, and many ran 
away. This done, the Committee prepared an elaborate re- 
port upon the property and finances of the State, and then, 
after a great parade, ten regiments strong, upon the Plaza 
and through the streets, they adjourned forever, and " the 
thirty-three " and their ten thousand backers retired into pri- 
vate life once more, and put an end to this singular spectacle 



174 Gkeater Britain. 

of the rebellion of a free people against rulers nominally elect- 
ed by itself. As my friend said, when he finished his long 
yarn, " This has more than archasologic interest : we may 
live to see a similar Vigilance Committee in New York." 

For my own part, I do not believe that an uprising against 
bad government is possible in New York City, because there 
the supporters of bad government are a majority of the peo- 
ple. Their interest is the other way : in increased city taxes, 
they evidently lose far more than, as a class, they gain by 
what is spent among them in corruption ; but when they 
come to see this, they will not rebel against their corrupt 
leaders, but elect those whom they can trust. In San Fran- 
cisco the case was widely different : through the ballot frauds 
a majority of the citizens were being infamously misgoverned 
by a contemjDtible minority, and the events of 1856 were only 
the necessary acts of the majority to regain their power, 
coupled with certain exceptional acts of arbitrary transporta- 
tion of "Pikes" and Southern rowdies, justified by the ex- 
ceptional circumstances of the young community. At Mel- 
bourne, under circumstances somewhat similar, our English 
colonists, instead of setting up a committee, built Pentridge 
Stockade with walls some thirty feet high, and created a mil- 
itary police, with almost arbitrary power. The difference is 
one in terms. The whirl of life in a young gold country not 
only prevents the best men entering the political field, and so 
forces citizens to exercise their right of choice only between 
candidates of equal badness, but so engrosses the members of 
the community who exercise the ballot as to prevent the de- 
tection of fraud till it has ruled for years. Throughout 
young countries generally you find men say, " Yes, we're rob- 
bed, we know ; but no one has time to go into that." " I'm 
for the old men," said a Californian elector once, " for 
they've plundered us so long that they're gorged, and can't 
swallow any more." "No," said another, "let's have fresh 
blood. Give every man a chance of robbing the State. 
Share and share alike." The wonder is, not that in such a 
State as California was till lately the machinery of government 
should work unevenly, but that it should work at all. De- 
mocracy has never endured so rough a test as that from which 
it has triumphantly emerged in the Golden State and City. 



Lynch -liAw. 175 

The public spirit with which the merchants came forward 
and gave time and money to the cause of order is worthy of 
all praise, and the rapidity with which the organization of a 
new government was carried through is an instance of the 
singular power of our race for building up the machinery of 
self-government under conditions the most unpromising. In- 
stead of the events of 1856 having been a case of opposition 
to law and order, they will stand in history as a remarkable 
proof of the law-abiding character of a people who vindicated 
justice by a demonstration of overwhelming force, laid down 
their arms, and returned in a few weeks to the peaceable 
routine of business life. 

If in the merchant-founders of the Vigilance Committees 
of San Francisco we can see the descendants of the justice- 
loving Germans of the time of Tacitus, I found in. another 
class of vigilants the moral offspring of Alfred's village al- 
dermen of our own Saxon age. From Mr. William M. By- 
ers, now editor of the Rocky Mountain Neics, I had heard 
the story of the early settlers' land-law in Missouri ; in Stan- 
ton's office in Denver City I had seen the records of the 
Arapahoe County Claim-club, with which he had been con- 
nected at the first settlement of Colorado ; but at San Jose I 
heard details of the settlers'" custom-law — the Calif ornian 
" grand-colltumier," it might be called — ^which convinced me 
that, in order to find the rudiments of all that, politically 
speaking, is best and most vigorous in the Saxon mind, you 
must seek countries in which Saxon civilization itself is in its 
infancy. The greater the difficulties of the situation, the 
more racy the custom, the more national the law. 

When a new State began to be " settled up " — that is, its 
lands entered upon by actual settlers, not land-sharks — the in- 
habitants often found themselves in the wilderness, far in ad- 
vance of attorneys, courts, and judges. It was their custom 
when this occurred to divide the territory into districts of 
fifteen or twenty miles square, and form for each a " claim- 
club " to protect the land-claims, or property of the members. 
Whenever a question of title arose, a judge and jury were 
chosen from among the members to hear and determine the 
case. The occupancy title was invariably protected up to a 
certain number of acres, which was differently fixed by differ- 



176 GrREATER BRITAIN. 

ent clubs, and varied in those of which I have heard the rules 
from 100 to 250 acres, averaging 150. The United States 
" Homestead " and " Pre-emption " laws were founded on the 
practice of these clubs. The claim-clubs interfered only for the 
protection of their members, but they never scrupled to hang 
willful offenders against their rules, whether members or out- 
siders. Execution of the decrees of the club was generally 
left to the county sheriff, if he was a member, and in this case 
a certain air of legality was given to the local action. It is 
perhaps not too much to say that a Western sheriff is an ir- 
responsible official, possessed of gigantic powers, but seldom 
known to abuse them. He is a Caesar, chosen for his honesty, 
fearlessness, clean shooting, and quick loading, by men who 
know him well : if he breaks down, he is soon deposed, and a 
better man chosen for dictator. I have known a Western pa- 
per say, " Frank is our man for sheriff next October. See the 
way he shot one of the fellows who robbed his store, and fol- 
low up the other, and shot him too the next day. Frank is 
the boy for us." In such a state of society as this, the dis- 
tinction between law and Lynch-law can scarcely be said to 
exist, and in the eyes of every Western settler, the claim-club, 
backed by the sheriff's name, was as strong and as full of the 
majesty of the law as the Supreme Court of the United States. 
Mr. Byers told me of a case of the infliction of death-punish- 
ment by a claim-club which occurred in Kansas after the 
" Homestead " law was passed, allowing the occupant, when 
he had tilled and improved the land for five years, to purchase 
it at one dollar and a quarter an acre. A man settled on a 
piece of land, and labored on it for some years. He then 
" sold it," which he had, of course, no power to do, the land 
being still the property of the United States. Having done 
this, he went and " pre-empted " it under the Homestead Act 
at the government price. When he attempted to eject the 
man to whom he had assumed to sell, the club ordered the 
sheriff to " put the man away," and he was never seen again. 
Perhaps Mr. Byers was the sheriff ; he seemed to have the de- 
tails at his fingers' ends, and his later history in Denver, where 
he once had the lynching-rope round his neck for exposing 
gamblers, testifies to his boldness. 

Some of the rascalities which the claim-clubs were expect- 



Lynch -Law. 177 

ed to put down were ingenious enough. Sometimes a man 
would build a dozen houses on a block of land, and, going 
there to enter on possession after they were complete, would 
find that in the night the whole of them had disappeared. 
Frauds under the Homestead Act were both many and strange. 
Men were required to prove that they had on the land a house 
of at least ten feet square. They have been known to whittle 
out a toy-house with their bowie, and carrying it to the land, 
to measure it in the presence of a friend — twelve inches by 
thirteen. In court, the pre-emptor, examining his own wit- 
ness, would say, " What are the dimensions of that house of 
mine?" " Twelve by thirteen." " That will do." In Kansas, 
a log-house of the regulation size was fitted up on wheels, and 
let at ten dollars a day, in order that it might be wheeled on 
to different lots, to be sworn to as a house upon the land. 
Men have been known to make a window-sash and frame, and 
keep them inside of their windowless huts, to swear that they 
had a window in their house — another of the requirements of 
the act. It is a singular mark of deference to the traditions 
of a Puritan ancestry that such accomplished liars as the 
Western land-sharks should feel it necessary to have any foun- 
dation whatever for their lies ; but not only in this respect 
are they a curious race. One of their peculiarities is that, 
however wealthy they may be, they will never place their 
money out at interest, never sink it in a speculation, however 
tempting, when there is no prospect of almost immediate 
realization. To turn their money over often, at whatever risk, 
is with these men an axiom. The advance-guard of civilization, 
they push out into an unknown wilderness, and seize upon 
the available lots, the streams, the springs, the river bottoms, 
the falls or " water privileges," and then, using their interest 
in the territorial Legislature — using, perhaps, direct corrup- 
tion in some cases — they procure the location of the State 
capital upon their lands, or the passage of the railroads through 
their valleys. The capital of ISTebraska has been fixed in this 
manner at a place two hundred and fifty miles from the near- 
est settlement. A newspaper appeared suddenly, dated from 
" Lincoln City, centre of Nebraska Territory," but published 
in reality in Omaha. To cope with such fellows, Western 
sheriffs need be no ordinary men. 

H2 



178' Greatek Britain. 

Thanks to the Vigilance Committees, California stands 
now before the other Far-western States. Rowdyism is be- 
ing put down as the God-fearing Northerners gain ground. 
It may still be dangerous to stroke your beard in a bar-room 
at Placerville or El Dorado ; " a gentleman in the loafing and 
chancing line " may still be met with in Sacramento ; here and 
there a Missourian " Pike," as yet unhung, may boast that he 
can whip his weight in wild-cats, but San Francisco has at 
least reached the age of outward decorum, has shut up public 
gaming-houses, and supports four Church papers. 

In Colorado Lynch-law is not, as yet, forgotten : the day 
we entered Denver the editor of the Gazette expressed, " on 
historical grounds," his deep regret at the cutting down of 
two fine cottonwood-trees that stood on Cherry Creek. When 
we came to talk to him we found that the " history " alluded 
to was that of the " escape up " these trees of many an early 
inhabitant of Denver City. " There's the tree we used to put 
the jury under, and that's the one we hanged 'em on. Put a 
cart under the tree, and the boy standing on it, with the rope 
around him ; give him time for a pray, then smack the whip, 
and ther' you air." 

In Denver we were reserved upon the subject of Vigilance 
Committees, for it is dangerous sometimes to make close in- 
quiries as to their constitution. While I was in Leavenworth, 
a man was hanged by the mob at Council Bluffs for asking the 
names of the Vigilants who had hanged a friend of his the 
year before. We learned enough, however, at Denver to show 
that the Committee in that city still exists ; and in Virginia 
and Carson I know that the organizations are continued ; but 
offenders are oftener shot quietly than publicly hanged, in or- 
der to prevent an outcry, and avoid the vengeance of the rela- 
tives. The verdict of the jury never fails to be respected, but 
acquittal is almost as unknown as mercy to those convicted. 
Innocent men are seldom tried before such juries, for the case 
must be clear before the sheriff will run the risk of being shot 
in making the arrest. When the man's fate is settled, the 
sheriff drives out quietly in his buggy, and next day men say, 

when they meet, " Poor 's escaped ;" or else it is " The 

sheriff's shot. Who'll run for office?" 

It will be seen, from the history of the Vigilance Commit- 



Golden City. 179 

tees, as I heard their stories from Kansas to California, that 
they are to be divided into two classes, with sharply-marked 
characteristics : those where committees, hangings, transporta- 
tions, warnings, are alike open to the light of day, such as the 
Committees of San Francisco in 1856, and the Sandwich Isl- 
ands in 1866, and those — unhappily the vast majority — where 
all is secret and irresponsible. Here, in San Francisco, the 
Committee was the government ; elsewhere the organizations 
were less wide, and the members, though always shrewdly guess- 
ed at, never known. ISTeither class should be necessary, unless 
when a gold rush brings down upon a State the desperadoes 
of the world ; but there is this encouragement even in the his- 
tory of Lynch-law: that, although English settlements often 
start wild, they never have been known to go wild. 

The men who formed the second Vigilance Committee of 
San Francisco are now the governor, senators, and Congress- 
men of CaHfornia, the mayors and sheriffs of our towns, 
l^owadays the citizens are remarkable, even among Americans, 
for their love of law and order. Their city, though still sub- 
ject to a yearly deluge from the outpourings of all the over- 
crowded slums of Europe, is, as the New Yorker said, the best 
policed in all America. In politics, too, it is remarked that 
party organizations have no power in this State from the mo- 
ment that they attempt to nominate corrupt or time-serving 
men. The people break loose from their caucuses and con- 
ventions, and vote in a body for their honest enemies rather 
than for corrupt friends. They have the advantage of singu- 
lar ability, for there is not an average man in California. 



CHAPTER XXII. 

GOLDEI^" CITY. 

The first letter which I delivered in San Francisco was 
from a Mormon gentleman to a merchant, who, as he read it, 
exclaimed, " Ah ! so you want to see the lions ? I'll pick you 
up at three, and take you there.'''' I wondered, but went, as 
travellers do. 

At the end of a pleasant drive along the best road in all 



180 Greater Britain. 

America, I found myself upon a cliff overhanging tlie Pacific, 
with a glorious outlook, seaward toward the Farallones, and 
northward to Cape Benita and the Golden Gate. Beneath, a 
few hundred yards from shore, was a conical rock, covered 
with shajDeless monsters, plashing the water and roaring cease- 
lessly, while others swam around. These were " the lions," 
my acquaintance said — the sea-lions. I did not enter upon an 
explanation of our slang phrase, " the lions," which the Mor- 
mon, himself an Englishman, no doubt had used, but took the 
first opportunity of seeing the remainder of " the lions "of the 
Golden City. 

The most remarkable spot in all America is Mission Dolo- 
res, in the outskirts of San Francisco City — once a settlement 
of the Society of Jesus^ and now partly blanket-factory and 
partly church. Nowhere has the conflict between the Saxon 
and Latin races been so sharp and so decisive. For eighty or 
ninety years California was first old Spanish, then Mexican, 
then a half-independent Spanish-American republic. The 
progress of those ninety years was shown in the foundation 
of half a dozen Jesuit " missions," who held each of them a 
thousand or two tame Indians as slaves, while a few military 
settlers and their friends divided the interior with the savage 
tribes. Gold, which had been discovered here by Drake, was 
never sought : the fathers, like the Mormon chiefs, discouraged 
mining ; it interfered with their " tame " Indians. Here and 
there, in four cases, perhaps in all, a presidio, or castle, had 
been built for the protection of the mission, and a puebla, or 
tiny free town, had been suffered to grow up, not without re- 
monstrance from the fathers. Los Angeles had thus sprung 
from the mission of that name, the fishing-village of Yerba 
Buena from Mission Dolores, on the Bay of San Francisco, 
and San Jose ^irom Santa Clara. 

In 1846, Fremont, the Pathfinder, conquered the country 
with forty-two men, and now it has a settled population of 
nearly half a million ; and San Francisco is as large as New- 
castle or Hull, as flourishing as Liverpool, and the Saxon blank- 
et-factory has replaced the Spanish mission. 

The story might have served as a warning to the French 
Emperor when he sent ships and men to found a " Latin em- 
pire in America." 



Golden City. 181 

Between the presidio and the Mission Dolores lies Lone 
Mountain Cemetery-j in that solitary calm and majesty of beau- 
ty which befits a home for the dead, the most lovely of all the 
cemeteries of America. Queen Emma, of the Sandwich Isl- 
ands, who is here at present, said of it yesterday to a Cahfor- 
nian merchant, " How comes it that you Americans, who live 
so fast, find time to bury your dead so beautifully ?" 

Lone Mountain is not the only delicious spot that is given 
up to the American dead. Laurel Hill, Mount Auburn, Green- 
wood, Cypress Grove, Hollywood, Oak Hill, are names not 
more full of poetry than are the places to which they belong : 
but Lone Mountain has over all an advantage in its giant 
fuchsias and scarlet geraniums, of the size and shape of trees, 
in the distant glimpses, too, of the still Pacific. 

San Francisco is ill placed, so far as mere building facilities 
are concerned. When the first houses were built in 1845 and 
1846, they stood on a strip of beach surrounding the sheltered 
cove of Yerba Buena, and at the foot of the steep and lofty 
sand-hills. Dunes and cove have disappeared together; the 
hills have been shot bodily into the bay, and the former har- 
bor is now the business quarter of the city. Not a street 
can be built without cutting down a hill or filling up a glen. 
Never was a great town built under heavier difficulties; but 
trade requires it to be exactly where it is, and there it will re- 
main and grow. Its former rivals, Vallejo and Benicia, are 
grass-grown villages, in spite of their having had the advan- 
tage of "a perfect situation." While the spot on which the 
Golden City stands was stiU occuj)ied by the struggling vil- 
lage of Yerba Buena, Francisca was a rising city, where cor- 
ner lots were worth their ten or twenty thousand dollars. 
When the gold-rush came, the village, shooting to the front, 
voted itself the name of its great bay, and Francisca had to 
change its title to Benicia, in order not to be thought a mere 
suburb of San Francisco. The mouth of the Columbia was 
once looked to as the future haven of Western America, and 
point of convergence of the railroad lines; but the "centre 
of' the universe " has not more completely removed from In- 
dependence to Fort Riley, than Astoria has yielded to San 
Francisco the claim to be the port of the Pacific. 

The one great danger of this coast all its cities share in 



182 Greater Britain. 

common. Three times within the present century the spot on 
which San Francisco now stands has been violently disturb- 
ed by subterranean forces. The earthquake of last year has 
left its mark upon Montgomery Street and the Plaza, for it 
frightened the San Franciscans into putting up light wooden 
cornices to hotels and banks, instead of the massive stone pro- 
jections that are common in the States : otherwise, though 
lesser shocks are daily matters, the San Franciscans have for- 
gotten the " great scare." A year is a long time in California. 
There is but little of the earliest San Francisco left, though 
the city is only eighteen years old. Fires have done good 
work as well as harm, and it is worth a walk up to the Plaza 
to see how prim and starched are the houses which now oc- 
cupy a square three sides of which were, in 1850, given up to 
public gaming-hells. 

One of the few remaining bits of old Golden City life is to 
be found in the neighborhood of the " What Cheer House," 
the resting-place of diggers on their way from the interior to 
take ship for "New York or Europe. Here there is no lack of 
coin, no want of oaths, no scarcity of drinks. " Mint-juleps " 
are as plentiful as in Baltimore itself ; Yerba Buena, the old 
name for San Francisco, means "mint." 

If the old character of the city is gone, there are still odd 
scenes to be met with in its streets. To-day I saw a master- 
builder of great wealth, with his coat and waistcoat off, and 
his hat stowed away on one side, carefully teaching a raw 
Irish lad how to lay a brick. He told me that the acquisition 
of the art would bring the man an immediate rise in his 
wages of from five to ten shillings a day. Unskilled labor, 
Mexican and Chinese, is plentiful enough, but white artisans 
are scarce. The want of servants is such that even the 
wealthiest inhabitants live with their wives and families in ho- 
tels, to avoid the cost and trouble of an establishment. Those 
who have houses pay rough, unkempt Irish girls from £6 to 
£S a month, mth board, " outings " when they please, and 
" followers " unlimited. 

The hotel-boarding has much to do with the somewhat un- 
womanly manner of a few among the ladies of the newest 
States, but the effect upon the children is more marked than 
it is upon their mothers. To a woman of wealth, it matters, 



Golden City. 183 

perhaps, but little whether she rules a household of her own, 
or boards in the first floor of some gigantic hostelry ; but it 
does matter a great deal to her children, who, in the One case, 
have a home to play and work in, and who, in the other, play 
on the stairs or in the corridors, to the annoyance of every so- 
journer in the hotel, and never dream of work out of school- 
hours, or of solid reading that is not compulsory. The only 
one of the common charges brought against America in En- 
glish society and in English books and papers that is thorough- 
ly true is the statement that American children, as a rule, are 
"forward," ill-mannered, and immoral. An American can 
scarcely be found who does not admit and deplore the facts. 
With the self-exposing honesty that is a characteristic of their 
nation, American gentlemen will talk by the hour of the terri- 
ble profligacy of the young !N"ew Yorkers. Boys, they tell 
you, who in England would be safe in lower school at Eton or 
in well-managed houses, in "New York or 'New Orleans are 
deep gamesters and God-defying rowdies. In Kew England 
things are better ; in the West there is yet time to prevent 
the ill arising; but even in the most old-fashioned of Ameri- 
can States the children are far too full of self-assurance. 
Their faults are chiefly faults of manner, but such in children 
have a tendency to become so many vices. On my way home 
from Egypt, I crossed the Simplon with a Southerner and a 
Pennsylvanian boy of fourteen or fifteen. An English boy 
would have expressed his opinion, and been silent : this lad's 
attacks upon the poor Southerner were unceasing and unfeel- 
ing, yet I could see that he was good at bottom. I watched 
my chance to give him my view of his conduct, and when we 
parted, he came up and shook hands, saying, " You're not a 
bad fellow for a Britisher, after all." 

In my walks through the city, I found its climate agree- 
able rather for work than idleness. Sauntering or lounging 
is as little possible as it is in London. The summer is not yet 
ended ; and in the summer at San Francisco it is cold after 
eleven in the day — strangely cold for the latitude of Athens. 
The fierce sun scorches up the valleys of the San Joaquin and 
the Sacramento in the early morning ; and the heated air, ris- 
ing from off the ground, leaves its place to be filled by the 
cold breeze from the Pacific. The Contra Costa range is un- 



184 Greater Britain. 

broken but by the single gaj) of the Golden Gate, and through 
this opening the cold winds rush in a never-ceasing gale, 
spreading fan-like as soon as they have passed the narrows. 
Hence it is that the Golden Gate is called "The Key-hole," 
and the wind "The Key-hole Breeze." Up country they 
make it raise the water for irrigation. In winter there is a 
calm, and then the city is as sunny as the rest of California. 

So purely local is the bitter gale, that at Benicia, ten miles 
from San Francisco, the mean temperature is ten degrees 
higher for the year, and nearly twenty for the summer. I 
have stood on the shore at Benicia when the thermometer was 
at a hundred in the shade, and seen the clouds pouring in 
from the Pacific, and hiding San .Francisco in a murky pall, 
while the temperature there was under 70 degrees. This fog 
retarded by a hundred years the discovery of San Francisco 
Bay. The entrance to the Golden City is narrow, and the 
mists hang there all day. Cabrillo, Drake, Viscaino, sailed 
past it without seeing that there was a bay, and the great 
land-locked sea was first beheld by. white men, when the mis- 
sionaries came upon its arms and creeks, far away inland. 

The peculiarity of climate carries with it great advantages. 
It is never too hot, never too cold to work — a fact which of 
itself secures a grand future for San Francisco. The effect 
upon national type is marked. At a San Franciscan ball you 
see English faces, not American. Even the lean Western men 
and hungry Yankees become plump and rosy in this temple 
of the winds. The high metallic ring of the "New England 
voice is not found in San Francisco. As for old men, Cali- 
fornia must have been that fabled province of Cathay, the vir- 
tues of which were such that, whatever a man's age when he 
entered it, he never grew older by a day. To dogs and 
strangers there are drawbacks, in the absence of winter : dogs 
are muzzled all the year round, and musquitoes are perennial 
upon the coast. 

The city is gay with flags ; every house supports a liberty- 
pole upon its roof ; for when the Union sentiment sprang up 
in San Francisco at the beginning of the war, public opinion 
forced every citizen to make a conspicuous exhibition of the 
stars and stripes by way of showing that it was from no want 
of loyalty that they refused to permit the circulation of Fed- 



Golden City. 185 

eral greenbacks. In this matter of flags the sea-gale is of 
service; for were it not for its friendly assistance, a short 
house between two tall ones could not sport a huge flag with 
much effect. As it is, the wind always blowing across the 
chief streets, and never up or down, the narrowest and lowest 
house can flaunt a large ensign without fear of its ever flaj)ping 
against the walls of its i)roud neighbors. 

It is not only in rosy cheeks that the Calif ornian English 
have the Old-world type. With less ingenuity than the New 
England Yankees, they have far more depth and solidity in 
their enterprise ; they do not rack their brain at inventing 
machines to peel apples and milk coyy^s, but they intend lo tun- 
nel through the mountains to Lake Tahoe, tap it, and with its 
waters irrigate the Calif ornian plains. They share our British 
love for cash payments and good roads ; they one and all set 
their faces against repudiation in any shape, and are strongly 
for what they call " rolling up " the debt. Throughout the 
war they quoted paper as depreciated, not gold as risen. In- 
deed, there is here the same unreasoning prejudice against 
paper-money that I met with in ll^evada. After all, what can 
be expected of a State which still produces three-eighths of all 
the gold raised yearly in the world. 

San Francisco is inhabited, as all American cities bid fair 
to be, by a mixed throng of men of all lands beneath the sun. 
New Englanders and Englishmen predominate in energy, 
Chinese in numbers. The French and Italians are stronger 
here than in any other city in the States ; and the red-skinned 
Mexicans, who own the land, supply the market-people and a 
small proportion of the towns-folk. Australians, Polynesians, 
and Chilians are numerous ; the Germans and Scandinavians 
alone are few; they prefer to go where they have already 
friends — to Philadelphia or Milwaukee. In this city — already 
a microcosm of the world — the English, British, and Ameri- 
can are in possession — have distanced the Irish, beaten down 
the Chinese by force, and are destined to physically prepon- 
derate in the cross-breed, and give the tone, political and mor- 
al, to the Pacific shore. New York is Irish, Philadelphia, 
German ; Milwaukee, Norwegian ; Chicago, Canadian ; Sault 
de St. Marie, French ; but in San Francisco — where all the 
foreign races are strong — none is dominant ; whence the sin- 



186 Greater Britain. 

gular result that California, the most mixed in population, is 
also the most English of the States. 

In this strange community, starting more free from the 
Puritan influence of New England than has hitherto done any- 
State within the Union, it is doubtful what religion will pre- 
dominate. Catholicism is " not fashionable " in America — ^it 
is the creed of the Irish, and that is enough for most Ameri- 
cans ; so Anglicanism, its critics say, is popular, as being " very 
proper." Whatever the cause, the Episcopalian Church is 
flourishing in California, and it seems probable that the Church 
which gains the day in California will eventually be that of 
the whole Paci^c. 

In Montgomery Street are some of the finest buildings in 
all America; the "Occidental Hotel," the "Masonic Hall," 
the " Union Club," and others. The club has only just been 
rebuilt, after its destruction by a nitro-glycerine explosion, 
which occurred in the express office next door. A case, of 
which no one knew the contents, was being lifted by two 
clerks, when it exploded, blowing down a portion of the club, 
and breaking half the windows in the city. On examination, 
it was found to be nitro-glycerine on its way to the mines. 

Another accident occurred here yesterday with this same 
compound. A sharp report was heard on board a ship lying 
in the docks, and the cook was found dead below; pieces of 
a flask had been driven into his heart and lungs. The deposit 
on the broken glass was examined, and found to be common 
oil ; but this morning I find in the Alta a report from a chem- 
ist that traces of nitro-glycerine have been discovered by him 
upon the glass, and a statement from one of the hands says 
that the ship on her way up had called at Manzanilla, where 
the cook had taken the flask from a merchant's office, emptied 
it of its contents, the character of which was unknown to him, 
and filled it with common vegetable oil. 

Since the great explosion at Aspinwall, nitro-glycerine has 
been the nightmare of Californians. For earthquakes they 
care little ; but the freaks of the devilish oil, which is brought 
here secretly for use in the N'evada mines, have made them 
ready to swear that it is itself a demon. They tell you that 
it freezes every night, and then the slightest friction will ex- 
plode it — ^that, on the other hand, it goes off if heated. If 



Golden City. 187 

you leave it standing in ordinary temperatures, the odds are 
that it undergoes decomposition, and then, if you touch it, it 
explodes ; and no lapse of time has on its power the smallest 
deteriorating effect, but, on the contrary, the oil will crystallize, 
and then its strength for harm is multiplied by ten. If San 
Francisco is ever destroyed by earthquake, old Calif ornians will 
certainly be found to ascribe the shock to nitro-glycerine. 

A day or two after my return from Benicia I escaped fi'om 
the city, and again went South, halting at San Jose, " The 
Garden City," and chief town of the fertile Guadaluj)e dis- 
trict, on my way to the quicksilver mines of New Almaden, 
now the greatest in the world, since they have beaten the 
Spanish mines and Idria. From San Jose I drove myself to 
Almaden, along a sun-diied valley with a fertile, tawny soil, 
reaching the delicious mountain stream, and the groves it 
feeds, in time to join my friends at lunch in the shady hacien- 
da. . The director took me through the refining-works, in 
which the quicksilver may be seen running in streams down 
gutters from the furnaces, but he was unable to go with me 
up the mountain to the mines fi'om which the cinnabar comes 
shooting down by its weight. The superintendent engineer 
— a meerschaum-equipped Bavarian — and myself mounted, at 
the Hacienda Gate, upon our savage-looking beasts, and I 
found myself for the first time lost in the depths of a Mexican 
saddle, and my feet plunged into the boot-stirrups that I had 
seen used by the Utes in Denver. The riding-feats of the 
Mexicans and the Californian boys are explained when you 
find that their saddle puts it out of the question that they 
should be thrown; but the fatigue that its size and shape 
cause to man and horse, when the man is a stranger to !N"ew 
Spain, and the horse knows that he is so, outweighs any pos- 
sible advantages that it may possess. With their huge gilt 
spurs attached to the stirrup, not to the boot, the double 
peak, and the embroidered trapj^ings, the Mexican saddles are 
the perfection at once of the cumbersome and the picturesque. 

Silently we half scrambled, half rode, up a break-neck path 
which forms a short cut to the mine, till all at once a charge 
of our horses at an almost perpendicular wall of rock was fol- 
lowed by their simultaneously commencing to kick and back 
toward the cliif . Springing off, we found that the girths had 



188 Geeater Britain. 

been slackened by the Mexican groom, and that the steep bit 
of mountain had caused the saddles to slip. This broke the 
ice, and we speedily found ourselves discussing miners and 
mining in French, my German not being much worse than 
my Bavarian's English. 

After viewing the mines, the walls of which, composed of 
crimson cinnabar, show bravely in the torch-glare, we worked 
our way through the tunnels to the topmost lode and open air. 

Bidding good-bye to what I could see of my German in 
the fog from his meerschaum, I turned to ride down by the 
road instead of the path. I had not gone a furlong, when, 
turning a corner, there burst upon me a view of the whole 
valley of tawny California, now richly golden in the colors of 
the fall. Looking from this spur of the Santa Cruz Mount- 
ains, w^ith the Contra Costa range before me, and Mount 
Hamilton towering from the plain apart, I could discern be- 
low me the gleam of the Coyote Creek, and of the windows 
in the Church of Santa Clara — in the distance, the mountains 
and waters of San Francisco Bay, from San Mateo to Alame- 
da and San Pablo, basking in unhindered sun. The wild-oats 
dried by the sun made of the plain a field of gold, dotted here 
and there with groups of black oak and bay, and darkened at 
the mountain-foot with " chapparal." The volcanic hills were 
rounded into softness in the delicious haze, and all nature 
overspread with a poetic calm. As I lost the view, the migh- 
ty fog was beginnmg to pour in through the Golden Gate to 
refresh America with dews from the Pacific. 



CHAPTER XXHI. 

LITTLE CHIjSTA. 

"The Indians begin to be troublesome again in Trinity 
County. One man and a Chinaman have been killed, and a 
lady crij^pled for life." 

That the antipathy everywhere exhibited by the English to 
colored races was not less strong in California than in the Car- 
olinas I had suspected, but I was hardly prepared for the de- 
liberate distinction between men and yellow men drawn in this 
paragraph from the Alta California of the day of my return 
to San Francisco, 



Little China. 189 

A determination to explore Little China, as the Celestial 
quarter of the city is termed, already arrived at, was only 
strengthened by the unconscious humor of the Alta, and I at 
once set off in search of two of the detectives, Edes and Sauls- 
bury, to whom I had some sort of introduction, and put my- 
self under their charge for the night. 

We had not been half an hour in the Chinese theatre or 
opera-house before my detectives must have repented of their 
offer to " show me round ;" for, incomprehensible as it must 
have seemed to them, with their N^ew England gravity and 
American contempt for the Chinese, I was amused beyond 
measure with the performance, and fairly lost myself in the 
longest laugh that I had enjoyed since I had left the planta- 
tions of Virginia. 

When we entered the house, which is the size of the Strand 
Theatre of London, it may have been ten or eleven o'clock. 
The performance had begun at seven, and was likely to last 
till two A.M. By the " performance " was meant this particu- 
lar act or scene, for the piece had been going on every evening 
for a month, and would be still in progress during the host 
part of another, it being the principle of the Chinese drama to 
take xip the hero at an early age, and conduct him to the grave 
-^which he reaches full of years and of honor. 

The house was crammed with a grinning crowd of " yellow 
boys," while the " China ladies " had a long gallery to them- 
selves. No sound of applause is to be heard in a Chinese 
place of amusement, but the crowd grin delight at the actors, 
who, for their part, grin back at the crowd. 

The feature of the performance which struck me at once 
was the hearty interest the actors took in the play, and the 
chaff that went on between them and the pit. It is not only 
from their numbers and the nature of their trades that the 
Chinese may be called the Irish of the Pacific ; there was soul 
in every gesture. 

On the stage behind the actors was a band, which played 
unceasingly, and so loud, that the performers, who clearly had 
not the smallest intention to subordinate their parts to the 
music, had to talk in shrieks in order to be heard. The audi- 
ence, too, all talked in their loudest natural tones. 

As for the play, a lady made love to an old gentleman (prob- 



190 Gkeater Britain. 

ably the hero, as this was the second month or third act of the 
play), and, bawling at him fiercely, was indignantly rejected by 
him in a piercing shriek. Relatives, male and female, coming 
with many howls to the assistance of the lady, were ignomin- 
iously put to flight, in a high falsetto key, by the old fellow's 
footmen, who w^ere in turn routed by a force of yelling spear- 
men, apparently the county ^osse. The soldiers wore paint in 
rings of various colors, put on so deftly, that of nose, of eyes, 
of mouth no trace could be discovered ; the front face resem- 
bled a target for archery. All this time a steady, unceasing 
uproar was continued by four gongs and a harp, with various 
cymbals, pavilions, triangles, and guitars. 

Scenery there was none, but boards were put up in the 
Elizabethan way, with hieroglyphics denoting the supposed lo- 
cality; and another archaic point is that all the female parts 
are played by boys. For this I have the word of the detect- 
ives ; my eyes, had I not long since ceased to believe them, 
would have given me proof to the contrary. 

The acting, as far as I could judge by the grimace, was ex- 
cellent. Nowhere could be found greater spirit, or equal j)ow- 
er of facial expression. The stage-fight was full of pantomimic 
force ; the leading soldier would make his fortune as a London 
pantaloon. 

When the detectives could no longer contain their distaste 
for the performance, we changed our quarters for a restaurant, 
the "Hang Heong," the wood of which was brought from 
China. 

The street along which we had to pass was decorated rath- 
er than lit by paper lanterns hung over every door ; but the 
" Hang Heong " was brilliantly illuminated, with a view, no 
doubt, to attracting the crowd as they poured out from the 
theatre at a later hour. The ground-floor was occupied by 
shop and kitchen, the dining-rooms being up stairs. The 
counter, which is on the plan of that in the houses of the Pa- 
lais Royal, was presided over, not by a smiling woman, but by 
grave and pig-tailed gentlemen in black, who received our or- 
der from the detective with the decorous solemnity of the 
head-waiter in an English country inn. 

The rooms up stairs were nearly full ; and as the Chinese 
by no means follow the Americans in silent eating, the babel 



Little China. 191 

was tremendous. A saucer and a pair of chop-sticks were given 
each of us, but at our request a spoon was furnished, as a spe- 
cial favor to " Melicans." 

Tiny cups of a sweet spirit were handed us before supper 
was brought up. The liquor was a kind of shrub, but white, 
made, I was told, from sugar-cane. For first course we had 
roast duck cut in pieces, and served in an oil-filled bowl, and 
some sort of fish ; tea was then brought in, and followed by 
shark's fin, for which I had given a special order ; the result 
might have been gum-arabic, for any flavor I could find. Dog 
was not to be obtained, and birds'-nest soup was beyond the 
purse of a traveller seven thousand miles from home, and 
twelve thousand from his next supplies. A dish of some 
strange black fungus stewed in rice, followed by preserves and 
cakes, concluded our supper, and were washed down by our 
third cups of tea. 

After paying our respects and our money to the gentleman 
in black, who grunted a lugubrious something that answered 
to " good-night," we paid a visit to the Chinese " bad quar- 
ter," which differs only in degree of badness from the 
" quartier Mexicain," the bad pre-eminence being ascribed, 
even by the prejudiced detectives, to the Spaniards and 
Chilians. 

Hurrying on, we reached the Chinese gaming-houses just 
before they closed. Some difficulty was made about admit- 
ting us by the " yellow loafers " who hung round the gate, as 
the houses are prohibited by law ; but as soon as the detect- 
ives, who were known, explained that they came not on bus- 
iness but on pleasure, we were suffered to pass in among 
the silent, melancholy gamblers. ISlot a word was heard be^ 
yond every now and then a grunt from the croupier. Each 
man knew what he was about, and won or lost his money 
in the stillness of a dead-house. The game appeared to be 
a sort of loto ; but a few minutes of it was enough, and the 
detectives pretended to no deep acquaintance with its prin- 
ciples. 

The San Francisco Chinese are not all mere theatre-goers, 
loafers, gamblers ; as a body, they are frugal, industrious, con- 
tented men. I soon grew to think it a pleasure to meet a 
Chinese American, so clean and happy in his look ; not a speck 



192 Gkeater Britain. 

is to be seen upon the blue cloth of his long coat or baggy 
trowsers. His hair is combed with care; the bamboo on 
which he and his mate together carry their enormous load 
seems as though cleansed a dozen times a day. 

It is said to be a peculiarity of the Chinese that they are 
all alike : no European can, without he has dealings with them, 
distiuguish one Celestial from another. The same, however, 
may be said of the Sikhs, the Australian natives, of most 
colored races, in short. The points of difference which distin- 
guish the yellow men, the red men, the black men with 
straight hair, the negroes, from any other race whatever, are 
so much more prominent than the minor distinctions between 
Ah Sing and Chi Long, or between Uncle ]N"ed and Uncle Tom, 
that the individual is sunk and lost in the national distinc- 
tions. To the Chinese, in turn, all Eurojoeans are alike ; but 
beneath these obvious facts there lies a grain of solid truth 
that is worth the hunting out, and which is connected with 
the change-of-type question in America and Australasia. Men 
of similar habits of mind and body are alike among ourselves 
in Europe ; noted instances are the close resemblance of Pere 
Enf antin, the St. Simonian chief, to the busts of Epicurus ; of 
Bismarck to Cardinal Ximenes. Irish laborers — men who, 
for the most part, work hard, feed little, and leave their minds 
entirely unplowed — are all alike; Chinamen, who all work 
hard, and work alike, who live alike, and who go further, and 
all think alike, are, by a mere law of nature, indistinguishable 
one from the other. 

In the course of my wanderings in the Golden City, I light- 
ed on the house of the Canton Company, one of the Chinese 
benevolent societies, the others being those of Hong Kong, 
Macao, and Amoy. They are like the New York Immigra- 
tion Commission and the London " Societe rran9aise de Bien- 
faisance" combined; added to a theatre and joss-house, or 
temple, and governed on the principles of such clubs as those 
of the " whites " or " greens " at Heidelberg, they are, in short, 
Chinese trades-unions, sheltering the sick, succoring the dis- 
tressed, finding work for the unemployed, receiving the immi- 
grants from China when they land, and shipping their bones 
back to China, ticketed with name and address, when they 
die. " Hong-Kong, with dead Chinamen," is said to be a com- 



• Little China. 193 

mon answer from outward-bounders to a hail from the guard- 
ship at the Golden Gate. 

Some of the Chinese are wealthy : Tung Yu & Co., Chi 
Sing Tong & Co., Wing Wo Lang & Co., Chy Lung & Co., 
stand high among the merchants of the Golden City. Honest 
and wealthy as these men are allowed to be, they are despised 
by every white Calif ornian, from the governor of the State to 
the Mexican boy who cleans his shoes. 

Li America, as in Australia, there is a violent prejudice 
against John Chinaman. He pilfers, we are told ; he lies, he 
is dirty, he smokes opium, is full of bestial vices — a pagan, and 
— what is far more important — ^yellow ! All his sins are to 
be pardoned but the last. Californians, when in good-humor, 
will admit that John is sober, patient, peaceable, and hard- 
working, that his clothes, at least, are scrupulously clean ; but 
he IS yellow ! Even the Mexicans, themselves despised, look 
down upon the Chinamen, just as the IN'ew York Irish affect 
to have no dealings with " the naygurs." The Chinese them- 
selves pander to the feeling. Their famous appeal to the Cal- 
ifornian Democrats may or may not be true: "What for 
Democlat allee timee talkee dam Chinaman ? Chinaman allee 
samee Democlat; no likee nigger, no likee injun." "Lifer- 
nals," " Celestials," and " Greasers " — or black men, yellow 
men, and Mexicans — ^it is hard to say which are most despised 
by the American whites in California. 

The Chinaman is hated by the rough fellows for his cow- 
ardice. Had the Chinese stood to their rights against the 
Americans, they would long since have been driven from Cal- 
ifornia. As it is, here and in Victoria they invariably give 
way, and never work at diggings which are occupied by 
whites. Yet in both countries they take out mining licenses 
from the State, which is bound to protect them in the posses- 
sion of the rights thus gained, but which is powerless against 
the rioters of Ballarat, or the " Anti-chinese mob" of El 
Dorado. 

The Chinese in California are practically confined by pub- 
lic opinion, violence, or threats, to inferior kinds of work, 
which the " meanest " of the whites of the Pacific States re- 
fuse to perform. Politically, this is slavery. All the evils to 
which slavery has given rise in the Cotton States are produced 

I 



194 Greater Britain. 

here by violence, in a less degree only because the Chinese 
are fewer than were the negroes. 

In spite of a prejudice which recalls the time when the 
British Government forbade the American colonist to employ 
negroes in the manufacture of hats, on the ground that white 
laborers could not stand the competition, the yellow men con- 
tinue to flock to " Gold Hills," as they call San Francisco. 
Already they are the washermen, sweepers, and porters of 
three States, two Territories, and British Columbia. They 
are denied civil rights ; their word is not taken in cases where 
white men are concerned ; a heavy tax is set upon them on their 
entry to the State ; a second tax when they commence to mine — 
still their number steadily increases. In 1 85 2, Governor Bigler, 
in his message, recommended the prohibition of the immigra- 
tion of the Chinese, but they now number one-tenth of the 
population. 

The Irish of Asia, the Chinese have commenced to flow over 
on to the outer world. Who shall say where the flood will 
stop ? Ireland, with now five millions of people, has in twenty 
years poured an equal number out' into the world. What is 
to prevent the next fifty years seeing an emigration of a 
couple of hundreds of millions from the rebellion-torn prov- 
inces of Cathay ? 

Three Chinamen in a temperate climate will do as much 
arm-work as two Englishmen, and will eat or cost less. It 
looks as though the cheaper would starve out the dear race, 
as rabbits drive out stronger but hungrier hares. This tend- 
ency is already plainly visible in our mercantile marine : the 
ships are manned with motley crews of Bombay Lascars, 
Maories, Negroes, Arabs, Chinamen, Kroomen, and Malays. 
There are no British or American seamen now, except boys 
who are to be quartermasters some day, and experienced 
hands who are quartermasters already. But there is nothing 
to regret in this : Anglo-Saxons are too valuable to be used 
as ordinary seamen where Lascars will do nearly, and Maories 
quite as well. N^ature seems to intend the English for a race 
of officers, to direct and guide the cheap labor of the Eastern 
peoples. 

The serious side of the Chinese problem — just touched on 
here — will force itself rudely upon our notice in Australia. 



California. 195 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

CALIFOENIA. 

"In front of San Francisco are 745,000,000 of hungry- 
Asiatics, who have spices to exchange for meat and grain." 

The words are Governor Gilpin's, made use of by him in 
discussing the future of overland trade, and worthy of notice, 
as showing why it is that, in making forecasts of the future 
of California, we have to look more to her facilities for trade 
than to her natural productions. San Francisco aims at being, 
not so much the port of California, as one of the chief stations 
on the Anglo-Saxon highway round the globe. 

Although the chief claim of California to consideration is 
her ]3osition on the Pacific, her fertihty and size alone entitle 
her to notice. This single State is 750 miles in length — would 
stretch from Chamouiii to the southernmost point of Malta. 
There are two capes in California — one nearly in the latitude 
of Jerusalem, the other nearly in the latitude of Rome. The 
State has twice the area of Great Britain ; the single valley of 
the Joaquin and Sacramento, from Tulare Lake to the great 
snow-peak of Shasta, is as large as the three kingdoms. 
Every useful mineral, every kind of fertile soil, every variety 
of heljiful climate, are to be found within the State. There 
are in the Union forty-five such States or Territories, with an 
average area equal to that of Britain. 

Between the Pacific and the snows of the Sierra are the 
three great tracts, each with its soil and character. On the 
slopes of the Sierra are the forests of giant timber, the shel- 
tered valleys, and the gold-fields in which I spent my first week 
in California. ISText comes the great hot plain of Sacramento, 
where, with irrigation, all the best fruits of the tropics grow 
luxuriantly, where water for irrigation is plentiful, and the 
Pacific breeze will raise it. Round the valley are vast tracts 
for sheep and wheat, and on the Contra Costas are millions of 
acres of wild oats growing on the best of lands for cattle, 
while the slopes are covered with young vines. Between the 
Contra Costa range and the sea is a winterless strip, possessing 



196 



Greater Britain. 




EL-CAPITAN, TOSEMITE VALLEY. 

for table vegetables and flowers the finest soil and climate in 
the world. The story goes that Californian boys, Avhen asked 
if they believe in a future state, reply, " Guess so ; California." 
Whether San Francisco will grow to be a second Liver- 
pool or New York, is an all-absorbing question to those who 
live on the Pacific shores, and one not without an interest and 
a moral for ourselves. New York has waxed rich and huge 
mainly because she is so placed as to command one of the best 
harbors on the coast of a country which exports enormously 



California. 197 

of breadstuft's. Liverpool has thrived as one of the shipping- 
ports for the manufacturers of the northern coal counties of 
England. San Francisco Bay, as the best harbor south of 
Puget Sound, is, and will remain, the centre of the export- 
trade of the Pacific States in wool and cereals. If coal is 
found in plenty in the Golden State, population will increase, 
manufactures spring up, and the export of wrought articles 
take the place of that of raw produce. If coal is found in 
the Contra Costa range, San Francisco will continue, in spite 
of earthquakes, to be the foremost port on the Pacific side ; 
if, as is more probable, the find of coal is confined to the 
Monte Diablo district, and is of trifling value, still the future 
of San Francisco as the meeting-point of the railways, and 
centre of the import of manufactured goods, and of the ex- 
port of the produce of an agricultural and pastoral interior, 
is as certain as it must inevitably be brilliant. Whether 
the chief town of the Pacific States will in time develop 
into one of the commercial capitals of the world, is a wider 
and a harder question. That it will be the converging point 
of the Pacific railroads both of Chicago and St. Louis, there 
can be no doubt. That all the new overland trade from 
China and Japan will pass through it, seems as clear ; it is the 
extent of this trade that is in question. For the moment, 
*land transit can not compete on equal terms with water car- 
riage ; but assuming that, in the long run, this will cease to 
be the case, it will be the overland route across Russia, and 
not that through, the United States, that will convey the silks 
and teas of China to Central and Western Europe. The very 
arsiuments of which the Californian merchants make use to 
show that the delicate goods of China need land transport, go 
to prove that shipping and unshipping in the Pacific, and a 
repetition in the Atlantic of each process, can not be good for 
them. The political importance to America of the Pacific 
railroads does not admit of overstatement; but the Russian 
or English Pacific routes must, commercially speaking, win 
the day. For rare and costly Eastern goods, the English rail- 
way through Southern China, Upper India, the Persian coast, 
and the Euphrates is no longer now a dream. If Russian 
bureaucracy takes too long to move, trade will be diverted by 
the Gulf route ; coarser goods and food will long continue to 



193 Greater Britain. 

come by sea, but in no case can the city of San Francisco be- 
come a western outpost of Europe. 

The lustre of the future of San Francisco is not dimmed 
by considerations such as these ; as the port of entry for the 
trade of America with all the East, its wealth must become 
enormous ; and if, as is probable, Japan, New Zealand, and 
New South Wales become great manufacturing communities, 
San Francisco must needs in time take rank as a second, if 
not a greater London. This, however, is the more distant fu- 
ture. With cheaper labor than the Pacific States and the 
British colonies possess, with a more settled government than 
Japan — Pennsylvania and Ohio, from the time that the Pa- 
cific Railroad is completed, will take, and for years will keep, 
the China trade. As for the colonies, the voyage from San 
Francisco to Australia is almost as long and difficult as that 
from England ; and there is every probability that Lancashire 
and Belgium will continue to supply the colonists with clothes 
and tools until they themselves, possessed as they are of coal, 
become competent to make them. The merchants of San 
Francisco will be limited in the main to the trade with China 
and Japan. In this direction the future has no bounds : 
through California and the Sandwich Islands, through Japan, 
fast becoming American, and China, the coast of which is al- 
ready British, our race seems marching westward to universal 
rule. The Russian Empire itself, with all its passive strength, 
can not stand against the English horde, ever pushing, with 
burning energy, toward the setting sun. Rugsia and England 
are said to be nearing each other upon the Indus; but long 
before they can meet there, they will be face to face upon the 
Amoor. 

For a time the flood may be diverted south or north : Mex- 
ico will doubtless, and British Columbia will probably, carry 
off a portion of the thousands who are pouring west from the 
bleak rocks of New England. The Californian expedition of 
1853 against Sonora and Lower California will be repeated 
with success, but the tide will be but momentarily stayed. So 
entirely are English countries now the mother-lands of energy 
and adventure throughout the Avorld, that no one who has 
watched what has happened in California, in British Columbia, 
and on the west coast of New Zealand, can doubt that the 



Califoenia. 199 

discovery of placer gold-fields on any coast or in any sea-girt 
country in the world, must now be followed by the speedy 
rise there of an English government : were gold, for instance, 
found in surface diggings in Japan, Japan would be English 
in five years. We know enough of Chili, of the new Russian 
country on the Amoor, of Japan, to be aware that such dis- 
coveries are more than likely to occur. 

In the face of facts like these, men are to be found who 
ask whether a break-up of the Union is not still probable — 
whether the Pacific States are not likely to secede from the 
Atlantic; some even contend for the general principle that 
"America must go to pieces — she is too big." It is small 
powers, not great ones, that have become inipossible : the uni- 
fication of Germany is in this respect but the dawn of a new 
era. The great countries of to-day are smaller than were the 
smallest of a hundred years ago. Lewes was farther from 
London in 1700 than Edinburgh is now. New York and 
San Francisco will in 18 TO be nearer to each other than Can- 
ton and Pekin. From the point of view of mere size, there is 
more likelihood of England entering the Union than of Cali- 
fornia seceding from it. 

The material interests of the Pacific States will always lie 
in union. The West, sympathizing in the main with the 
Southerners upon the slavery question, threw herself into the 
Avar, and crushed them, because she saw the necessity of keep- 
ing her outlets under her own control. The same policy 
would hold good for the Pacific States in the case of the con 
tinental railroad. America, of all countries, alone shares the 
future of both Atlantic and Pacific, and she knows her inter- 
ests too well to allow such an advantage to be thrown away, 
Uncalculating rebellion of the Pacific States upon some sud- 
den heat, is the only danger to be apprehended, and such a 
rising could be put down with ease, owing to the manner in 
which these States are commanded from the sea. Through- 
out the late rebellion, the Federal navy, though officered al- 
most* entirely by Southerners, was loyal to the flag, and it 
would be so again. In these days loyalty may be said to be 
peculiarly the sailor's passion : perhaps he loves his country 
because he sees so little of it. 

The single danger that looms in the more distant future is 



200 Greater Britain. 

the eventual control of Congress by the Irish, while the En- 
a:lish retain their hold on the Pacific shores. 

^ ^ ^ T* V 

California is too British to be typically American: it 
would seem that nowhere in the United States have we found 
the true America or the real American. Except as abstrac- 
tions, they do not exist ; it is only by looking carefully at each 
eccentric and irregular America — at Irish New York, at Puri- 
tan New England, at the rowdy South, at the rough and swag- 
gering Far West, at the cosmopolitan Pacific States — that we 
come to reject the anomalous features, and to find America 
in the points they possess in common. It is when the country 
is left that there rises in the mind an image that soars above 
all local prejudice — that of the America of the law-abiding, 
mighty people who are imposing English institutions on the 
world. 



CHAPTER XXV. 

MEXICO. 



Ik company with a throng of men of all races, all tongues, and 
all trades, such as a Calif ornian steamer can alone collect, I came 
coasting southward under the cliffs of Lower California. Of 
the thousand passengers who sought refuge from the stifling 
heat upon the upper and hurricane decks, more than half were 
diggers returning with a " pile " to their homes in the Atlan- 
tic States. "While we hung over the bulwarks watching the 
bonitos and the whales, the diggers threw " bolas " at the boo- 
bies that flew out to us from the blazing rocks, and brought 
them down screaming upon the decks. Threading our way 
through the reefs off the lovely Island of Margarita, where 
the " Independence " was lost, with three hundred human be- 
ings, we lay to at Cape St. Lucas, and landed his excellency 
Don Antonio Pedrin, Mexican Governor of Lower California, 
and a Juarez man, in the very bay where Cavendish lay in wait 
for months for the " great Manilla ship," the Acapulco galleon. 

When Girolamo Benzoni visited the Mexican Pacific coast, 
he confused the turtle with the " crocodile," describing the 



Mexico. 201 

former under the latter's name ; but at Manzanilla the two may- 
be seen lying almost side by side upon the sands. Separated 
from the blue waters of the harbor by a narrow strand, there 
is a festering lagoon, the banks of which swarm with the small- 
er alligators ; but a few yards off, upon the other slope, the 
towns-folk and the turtles they had brought down for sale to 
our ship's purser were lying, when I saw them, in a confused 
heap, under an awning of sail-cloth nailed up to the palm-trees. 
Alligator, turtle, Mexican, it was hard to say which was the su- 
perior being. A French corvette was in possession of the port 
— one of the last of the holding-places through which the rem- 
nants of the army of occupation were dribbling back to France. 

In the land-locked Bay of Acapulco, one of the dozen " hot- 
test places in the world," we found two French frigates, whose 
officers boarded us at once. They told us that they landed 
their marines every morning after brealifast, and re-embarked 
them before sunset ; they could get nothing from the shore 
but water ; the Mexicans, under Alvarez, occupied the town 
at night, and carried ofE even the fruit. When I asked about 
supplies, the answer was sweeping : " Ah, mon Dieu, monsieur, 
cette ssacrrreeee canaille de Alvarez nous vole tout. N"ous 
n'avons que de I'eau fraiche, et Alvarez va nous emporter la 
fontaine aussi quelque nuit. Ce sont des voleurs, voyez-vous, 
ces Mechicanos." When they granted us leave to land, it was 
with the proviso that we should not blame them if we were 
shot at by the Mexicans as we went ashore, and by themselves 
as we came off again. Firing often takes place at night be- 
tween Alvarez and the French, but with a total loss in many 
months of only two men killed. 

The day of my visit to Acapulco was the anniversary of, the 
issue, one year before, of Marshal Bazaiae's famous order of 
the day, directing the instant execution, as red-handed rebels, 
of Mexican prisoners taken by the French, It is a strange 
commentary upon the marshal's circular that, in a year from 
its issue, the " Latin Empire in America "should have had a 
term set to it by the President of the United States. In Can- 
ada, in India, in Egypt, in ^ew Zealand, the English have met 
the French abroad, and in this Mexican affair history does 
but repeat itself. There is nothing more singular to the Lon- 
doner than the contempt of the Americans for France. All 

12 



202 Greater Britain. 

Europe seems small when seen from the United States ; but 
the opinion of Great Britain and the strength of Russia are 
still looked on with some respect : France alone completely 
vanishes, and instead of every one asking, as with us, " What 
does the Emperor say ?" no one cares in the least what Na- 
poleon does or thinks. In a Chicago paper I have seen a col- 
umn of Washington news headed, " Seward orders Lewis 
Napoleon to leave Mexico right away ! Nap lies badly to get 
out of the fix !" While the Americans are still, in a high de- 
gree, susceptible of affront from England, and would never, 
if they conceived themselves purposely insulted, stop to weigh 
the cost of war, toward France they only feel, as a Califor- 
nian said to me, " Is it worth our while to set to work to whip 
her ?" The effect of Gettysburg and Sadowa will be that, ex- 
cept Great Britain, Italy, and Spain, no nations will care much 
for the threats or praises of Imperial France. 

The true character of the struggle in Mexico has not been 
pointed out. It was not a mere conflict between the majori- 
ty of the people and a minority supported by foreign aid, but 
an uprising of the Indians of the country against the whites 
of the chief town. The Spaniards of the capital were Maxi- 
milian's supporters, and upon them the Indians and Mestizos 
have visited their revenge for the deeds of Cortez and Pizar- 
ro. On the west coast there is to be seen no trace of Spanish 
blood : in dress, in language, in religion, the people are Ibe- 
rian ; in features, in idleness, and in ferocity, undoubtedly 
Red Indian. 

In the reports of the Argentine Confederation, it is stated 
that the Circassian blood comes to the front in the mixed 
race; a few hundred Spanish families in La Plata are said to 
have absorbed several hundred thousand Indians, without 
suffering in their whiteness or other natural characteristics. 
There is something of the frog that swallowed the ox in this ; 
and the theories of the Argentine officials, themselves of the 
mixed race, can not outweigh the evidence of our own eyes 
in the sea-port towns of Mexico. There, at least, it is the 
Spaniards, not the Indians, who have disappeared ; and the 
only mixture of blood that can be traced is that of Red In- 
dian and negro, in the fisher-boys about the ports. They are 
lithe lads, with eyes full of art and fire. 



Mexico. 203 

The Spaniards of Mexico have become Red Indians, as the 
Turks of Europe have become Albanians or Circassians. 
"Where the conquering marries into the conquered race, it ends 
by being absorbed, and the mixed breed gradually becomes 
pure again in the type of the more numerous race. It would 
seem that the North American continent will soon be divided 
between the Saxon and the Aztec republics. 

In California I once met with a caricature in which Uncle 
Sam or Brother Jonathan is lying on his back upon Canada 
and the United States, with his head in Russian America, and 
his feet against a tumble-down fence, behind which is Mexico. 
His knees are bent, and his position cramped. He says, 
" Guess I shall soon have to stretch my legs some j'" There 
is not in the United States any strong feeling in favor of the 
annexation of the remainder of the continent, but there is a 
solemn determination that no foreign country shall in any way 
gain fresh footing or influence upon American soil, and that 
monarchy shall not be established in Mexico or Canada. 
Further than this, there is a belief that, as the south central 
portions of the States become fully peopled up, population 
will pour over into the Mexican provinces of Chihuahua and 
Sonora, and that the annexation of these and some other por- 
tions of Mexico to the United States can not long be prevent- 
ed. For such acquisitions of territory America would pay as 
she paid in the case of Texas, which she first conquered, and 
then bought at a fair price. 

In annexing the whole of Mexico, Protestant Americans 
would feel that they were losing more than they could gain. 
In California and New Mexico, they have already to deal with 
a population of Mexican Catholics, and difficulties have arisen 
in the matter of the Church lands. The Catholic vote is pow- 
erful not only in Cahfornia and New York, but in Maryland, 
in Louisiana, in Kansas, and even in Massachusetts. The sons 
of the Pilgrim Fathers would scarcely look with pleasure on 
the admission to the Union of ten millions of Mexican Catho- 
lics, and, on the other hand, the day-dreams of Leonard Cal- 
vert would not be realized in the triumph of such a Catholi- 
cism as theirs, any more than in the success of that of the Phil- 
adelphia Academy or New York Tammany Hall. 

With the exception of the Irish, the great majority of 



204 Greater Britain. 

Catholic immigrants avoid the United States, but the migra- 
tion of European Catholics to South America is increasing 
year by year. Just as the Germans, the ]!:^orwegians, and the 
Irish flow toward the States, the French, the Spanish, and the 
Italians flock into La Plata, Chili, and Brazil. The European 
population of La Plata has already reached three hundred 
thousand, and is growing fast. The French "mission" in 
Mexico was the making of that great country a further field 
for the Latin immigration ; and when the Calif ornians march- 
ed to Juarez's help, it was to save Mexico to E'orth America. 
In all history nothing can be found more dignified than the 
action of America upon the .Monroe doctrine. Since the prin- 
ciple was first laid down in words in 1823, the national action 
has been courteous, consistent, firm ; and the language used, 
now that America is all-powerful, is the same that her states- 
men used during the rebellion in the hour of her most instant 
peril. It will be hard for political philosophers of the future to 
assert that a democratic republic can have no foreign policy. 
The Pacific coast of Mexico is wonderfully full of beauties 
of a peculiar kindj the sea is always calm, and of a deep duU 
blue, with turtles lying basking on the surface, and flying-fish 
skimming lightly over its expanse, while the shores supply a 
fringe of bright yellow sand at once to the ocean blue and to 
the rich green of the cactus groves. On every spit or sand- 
bar there grows the feathery palm. A low range of jungle- 
covered hills is cut by gulUes, through which we get' glimpses 
of lagoons bluer than the sea itself, and behind them the sharp 
volcanic peaks rise through and into cloud. Once in a while 
Colima, or other giant hill, towering above the rest in blue- 
black gloom, serves to show that the shores belong to some 
mightier continent than Calypso's isle. 



CHAPTER XXVI. 

REPTJBLICAl? OR DEMOCRAT. 



Amo:n-g our Californian passengers we had many strong 
party-men, and political conversation never flagged throughout 
the voyage. In every discussion it became more and more 



Republican or De.mocrat. 205 

clear that the Democratic is the Constitutional, the Repub- 
lican the Utilitarian party — rigidly called " Radical," from its 
habit of going to the root of things, to see whether they are 
good or bad. Such, however, is the misfortune of America 
in the possession of a written Constitution, such the reverence 
paid to that document on account of the character of the men 
who penned it, that even the extremest Radicals dare not 
admit in public that they aim at essential change, and the 
party loses, in consequence, a portion of the strength that 
attaches to outspoken honesty. 

The President's party at their Convention — ^known as the 
" Wigwam " — which met while I was in Philadelphia, main- 
tained that the war had but restored the " Union as it was," 
with State Rights unimpaired. The Republicans say that they 
gave their blood, as they are ready again to shed it — for the 
" Union as it was notf for one nation, and not for thirty-six, 
or forty-five. The Wigwam declared that the Washington 
Government had no constitutional right to deny representa- 
tion in Congress to any State. The Republicans ask how, if 
this constitutional provision is to be observed, the Govern- 
ment of the country is to be carried on. The Wigwam laid 
it down as a principle that Congress had no power to inter- 
fere with the right possessed by each State to prescribe quali- 
fications for the elective franchise. The Radicals say that 
State sovereignty should have vanished when slavery went 
down, and ask how the South is to be governed consistently 
with republicanism unless by negro suffrage, and how this 
is to be maintained except by Federal control over the vari- 
ous States — ^by abolition, in short, of the old Union, and cre- 
ation of a new. The more honest among the Republicans 
admit that for the position which they have taken up they 
can find no warrant in the Constitution ; that, according to 
the doctrine which the "Continental statesman" and the 
authors of " The Federalist " would lay down, were they liv- 
ing, thirty-five of the States, even if they were unanimous, 
could have no right to tamper with the Constitution of the 
thirty-sixth. The answer to all this can only be that, were 
the Constitution to be closely followed, the result would be 
the ruin of the land. 

The Republican party have been blamed because their 



206 Greater Britain. 

theory and practice alike tend toward a consolidation of pow- 
er, and a strengthening of the hands of the Government at 
Washington. It is in this that lies their chief claim to sup- 
port. Local government is an excellent thing ; it is the 
greatest of the inventions of our inventive race, the chief 
security for continued freedom possessed by a people already 
free. This local government is consistent with a powerful 
executive ; between the village municipality and Congress, 
between the Cabinet and the district council of selectmen, 
there can be no conflict : it is State sovereignty, and the per- 
nicious heresy of primary allegiance to the State, that have 
already proved as costly to the republic as they are dangerous 
to her future. 

It has been said that America, under the Federal system, 
unites the freedom of the small State with the power of the 
great ; but though this is true, it is brought about, not 
through the federation of the States, but through that of the 
townships and districts. The latter are the true units to 
which the consistent Republican owes his secondary alle- 
giance. It is, perhaps, only in the tiny IsTew England States 
that Northern men care much about their commonwealth ; a 
citizen of Pennsylvania or New York never talks of his State 
unless to criticise its Legislature. After all, where intelligence 
and education are all but universal, where a spirit of freedom 
has struck its roots into the national heart of a great race, 
there can be no danger in centralization ; for the power that 
you strengthen is that of the whole people, and a nation can 
have nothing to fear from itself. 

In watching the measures of the Radicals, we must remem- 
ber that they have still to guard their country against great 
dangers. The war did not last long enough to destroy anti- 
republicanism along with slavery. The social system of the 
Carolinas was upset ; but the political fabric built upon a 
slavery foundation in such " free " States as New York and 
Maryland is scarcely shaken. 

If we look to the record of the Republican party with a 
view to making a forecast of its future conduct, we find that 
at the end of the war the party had before it the choice be- 
tween military rule and negro rule for the South — between a 
government carried on through generals and provost-marshals 



Republican oe Democeat. 207 

unknown to the Constitution and to the courts, and destined 
to prolong for ages the disruption of the Union and disquiet 
of the nation, and, on the other hand, a rule founded upon the 
principles of equity and self-government, dear to our race, and 
supported by local majorities, not by foreign bayonets. Al- 
though possessed of the whole military power of the nation, 
the Republicans refused to endanger their country, and estab- 
lished a system intended to lead, by gradual steps, to equal 
suffrage in the South. The immediate interest of the party, 
as distinguished from that of the country at large, was the 
other way. The Republican majority of the presidential 
elections of 1860 and 1864 had been increased by the success 
of the Federal arms, borne mainly by the Republicans of New 
England and the West, in a war conducted to a triumphant 
issue under the leadership of Republican Congressmen and 
generals. The apparent magnanimity of the admission of a 
portion of the rebels, warm-handed, to the poll, would still 
further have strengthened the Republicans in the Western 
and Border States ; and while the extreme wing would not 
have dared to desert the party, the moderate men would have 
been conciliated by the refusal of the franchise to the blacks. 
A foresight of the future of the nation happily prevailed over 
a more taking policy, and, to the honor of the RepubHcan 
leaders, equal franchise was the result. 

The one great issue between the Radicals and the Demo- 
crats since the conclusion of the war is this : the " Democ- 
racy" deny that the readmission to Congress of the repre- 
sentatives of the Southern States is a matter of expediency at 
all ; to them they declare that it is a matter of right. There 
was a rebellion in certain States which temporarily prevented 
their sending representatives; it is over, and their men must 
come. Either the Union is or is not dissolved; the Radicals 
admit that it is not ; that all their endeavors were to prevent 
the Union being destroyed by rebels, and that they succeeded 
in so doing. The States, as States, were never in rebellion ; 
there was only a powerful rebellion localized in certain States. 
" If you admit, then," say the Democrats, " that the Union is 
not dissolved, how can you govern a number of States by ma- 
jor-generals?" Meanwhile the Radicals go on, not wasting 
their time in words, but passing through the House and over 



208 Gkeater Britain. 

the President's veto the legislation necessary for the recon- 
struction of free government — with their illogical, but thor- 
oughly English good sense, avoiding all talk about constitu- 
tions that are obsolete, and laws that it is impossible to en- 
force, and pressing on steadily to the end that they have in 
view — equal rights for all men, free government as soon as 
may be. The one thing to regret is that the Republicans 
have not the courage to appeal to the national exigencies 
merely, but that their leaders are forced by public opinion to 
keep up the sham of constitutionalism. IsTo one in America 
seems to dream that there can be any thing to alter in the 
"matchless Constitution," which was framed by a body of 
slave-owners, filled with the narrowest aristocratic prejudices, 
for a country which has since abolished slavery, and become 
as democratic as any nation in the world. 

The system of presidential election and the Constitution of 
the Senate are matters to which the Republicans will turn 
their attention as soon as the country is rested from the w^ar. 
It is not impossible that a lifetime may see the abolition of 
the Presidency proposed, and carriedby the vote of the whole 
nation. If this be not done, the election wiU come to be made 
directly by the people, without the intervention of the Elect- 
oral College. The Senate, as now constituted, rests upon the 
States, and that State Rights are doomed, no one can doubt 
who remembers that of the population of l!^ew York State 
less than half are native-born New Yorkers. What concern 
can the cosmopolitan moiety of her people have with the 
State Rights of New York ? When a system becomes purely 
artificial, it is on the road to death ; when State Rights repre- 
sented the various sovereign powers which the old States had 
allowed to sleep while they entered a federal union. State 
Rights were historical ; but now that Congress by a single 
vote cuts and carves Territories as large as aU the old States 
put together, and founds new commonwealths in the wilder- 
ness, the doctrine is worn out. 

It is not likely that the Republicans will carry all before 
them without a check ; but though one consfervative reaction 
may follow another, although time after time the Democrats 
may return victorious from the fall elections, in the end Radi- 
calism must inevitably win the day. A party which takes for 



Eepublican or Democrat. 209 

its watchword, " The national good," will always beat the 
Constitutionalists. 

Except during some great crisis, the questions which come 
most home at election-times in a democratic country are 
minor points, in which the party not in power has always the 
advantage over the office-holders : it is on these petty matters 
that a cry of jobbery and corruption can be got up, and noth- 
ing in American politics is more taking than such a cry. " We 
are a liberal people, sir," said a Californian to me, " but among 
ourselves we don't care to see some men get more than their 
share of Uncle Sam's money. It doesn't go down at election- 
time to say that the Democrats are spoiling the country ; but 
it's a mighty strong plank that you've got if you prove that 
Hank Andrews has made a million of dollars by the last Con- 
gressional job. We say, ' Smart boy, Hanli Andrews,' but we 
generally vote for the other man." It is these small ques- 
tions, or " side issues," as they are termed, which cause the 
position of parties to fluctuate frequently in certain States. 
The first reaction against the now triumphant Radicals will 
probably be based upon the indignation excited by the exten- 
sion of Maine liquor laws throughout the whole of the States 
in which the New Englanders have the mastery. 

Prohibitive laws are not supported in America by the ar- 
guments with which aU of us in Britain are familiar. The 
ISTew England Radicals concede that, so far as the effects of 
the use of alcohol are strictly personal, there is no ground for 
the interference of society. They go even farther, and say 
that no ground for general and indiscriminate interference 
with the sale of liquor is to be found in the fact that drink 
maddens certain men, and causes them to commit crime. 
They are willing to admit that, were the evils confined to in- 
diyiduals, it would be their own affair ; but they attempt to 
show that the use of alcohol affects the condition, moral and 
physical, of the drinker's offspring, and that this is a matter so 
bound up with the general weal, that public interference may 
be necessary. It is the belief of a majority of the thinkers 
of New England that the taint of alcoholic poison is heredi- 
tary ; that the children of drunkards will furnish more than 
the ordinary proportion of great criminals ; that the descend- 
ants of habitual tipplers Avill be found to lack vital force, and 



210 Greater Britain. 

will fall into the ranks of pauperism and dependence : not only 
are the results of morbid appetite, they say, transmitted to the 
children, but the appetites themselves descend to the offspring 
with the blood. If this be true, the New England Radicals 
urge, the use of alcohol becomes a moral wrong, a crime even, 
of which the law might well take cognizance. 

We are often told that party organization has become so 
dictatorial, so despotic in America, that no one not chosen by 
the preliminary convention, no one, in short, whose name is 
not uj^on the party ticket, has any chance of election to an of- 
fice. To those who reflect upon the matter, it would seem as 
though this is but a consequence of the existence of party, 
and of the system of local representation : in England itself 
the like abuse is not unknown. Where neither party possesses 
overwhelming strength, division is failure ; and some knot or 
other of pushing men must be permitted to make the selection 
of a candidate, to which, when made, the party must adhere, 
or suffer a defeat. As to the composition of the nominating 
conventions, the grossest mis-statements have been made to 
us in England, for we have been gravely assured that a nation 
which is admitted to present the greatest mass of education 
and intelligence with the smallest intermixture of ignorance 
and vice of which the world has knowledge, allows itself to 
be dictated to in the matter of the choice of its rulers by 
caucuses and conventions composed of the idlest and most 
worthless of its population. Bribery, we have been told, 
reigns supreme in these assemblies; the nation's interest is 
but a phrase ; individual selfishness the true dictator of each 
choice ; the name of party is but a cloak for private ends, and 
the Avire-puUers are equalled in rascality only by their nomi- 
nees. 

It need hardly be shown that, were these stories true, a 
people so full of patriotic sentiment as that which lately fur- 
nished a million and a half of volunteers for a national war, 
would without doubt be led to see its safety in the destruc- 
tion of conventions and their wire-pullers— of party govern- 
ment itself, if necessary. It can not be conceived that the 
American people would allow its institutions to be stultified, 
and law itself insulted, to secure the temporary triumph of 
this party or of that, on any mere question of the day. 



Republican or Democrat. 211 

The secret of the power of caucus and convention is gen- 
eral want of time on the part of the community. Your hon- 
est and shrewd Western farmer, not having himself the lei- 
sure to select his candidate, is fain to let caucus or convention 
choose for him. In practice, however, the evil is far from 
great : the party caucus, for its own interest, will, on the 
whoie, select the fittest candidate available, and, in any case, 
dares not, except perhaps in New York City, fix its choice 
upon a man of known bad character. Even where Party is 
most despotic, a serious mistake committed by one of the 
nominating conventions will seldom fail to lose its side so 
many votes as to secure a triumph for the opponents. 

King Caucus is a great monarch, however ; it would be a 
mistake to despise him, and conventions are dear to the 
American people — at least, it would seem so, to judge from 
their number. Since I have been in America, there have been 
sitting, besides doubtless a hundred others, the names of 
which I have not noticed, the Philadelj)hia " Copjjer-Johnson 
Wigwam," or assembly of the Presidential j)arty (of which 
the Radicals say that it is but " the Copperhead organization 
with a fresh snout"), a Dentists' Convention, a Phrenological 
Convention, a Pomological Congress, a School-teachers' Con- 
vention, a Fenian Convention, an Eight-hour Convention, an 
Insurance Companies' Convention, and a Loyal Soldiers' Con- 
vention. One is tempted to think of the assemblies in '48 in 
Paris, and of the caricatures representing the young bloods 
of the Paris Jockey Club being addressed by their Presi- 
dent as " Citoyens Yicomtes," whereas, when the cafe waiters 
met in their Congress, it was " Messieurs les Gar9ons-limo- 
nadiers." 

The Pomological Convention was an extremely jovial one, 
all the horticulturists being whisky-growers themselves, and 
having a proper wish to compare their own with their neigh- 
bors' " Bourbon " or " old rye." Caucuses or (cauci : which 
is it ?) of this kind suggest a derivation of this name for what 
many consider a low American proceeding, from an equally 
low Latin word of similar sound and spelling. In spite of 
the phrase " a dry caucus " being not unknown in the temper- 
ance State of Maine, many might be inclined to think that 
caucuses, if not exactly vessels of grace, were decidedly 



212 Greater Britain. 

" drinking-vessels ;" but Americans tell you that the word is 
derived from the phrase a " calker's meeting," calkers being 
peculiarly given to noise. 

The cry against conventions is only a branch of that against 
" politicians," which is continually being raised by the ad- 
herents of the side which happens at the moment to be the 
weaker, and which evidently helps to create the evils agfcst 
which its authors are protesting. It is now the New York 
Democrats who tell such stories as that of the Columbia Dis- 
trict census-taker going to the Washington house of a wealthy 
Boston man to find out his religious tenets. The door was 
opened by a black boy, to whom the white man began : 
" What's your name ?" " Sambo, sah, am my Christian 
name." " Wall, Sambo, is your master a Christian ?" To 
which Sambo's indignant answer was, " No, sah ! Mass' mem- 
ber ob Congress, sah !" When the Democrats were in power, 
it was the Republicans of Boston and the Cambridge pro- 
fessors who threw out sly hints, and violent invectives, too, 
against the whole tribe of " politicians." Such unreasoning 
outcries are to be met only by bare facts ; but were a jury of 
readers of the debates in Parliament and in Congress to be 
empanelled to decide whether political immorality were not 
more rife in England than in America, I should, for my part, 
look forward with anxiety to the result. 

The organization of the Republican party is hugely power- 
ful : it has its branches in every township and district in the 
Union ; but it is strong, not in the wiles of crafty plotters, not 
in the devices of unknown politicians, but in the hearts of the 
loyal people of the country. If there were nothing else to be 
said to Englishmen on the state of parties in America, it 
should be sufficient to point out that, while the " Democracy " 
claim the Mozart faction of New York and the shoddy aris- 
tocracy, the pious New Englanders and their sons in the 
North-west are, by a vast majority. Republicans ; and no " side 
issues " should be allowed to disguise the fact that the Dem- 
ocratic is the party of New York, the Republican the party of 
America. 



Brothers. 213 



CHAPTER XXYII. 

BEOTHEES. 

I HAD landed in America at the moment of what is known 
in Canada as " the great scare " — that is, the Fenian invasion 
at Fort Erie. Before going South, I had attended at New 
York a Fenian meeting held to protest against the conduct 
of the President and Mr. Seward, who, it was asserted, after 
deluding the Irish with promises of aid, had abandoned them, 
and even seized their supplies and arms. The chief speaker 
of the evening was Mr. Gibbons, of Philadelphia, " Vice-pres- 
ident of the Irish Republic," a grave and venerable man ; no 
rogue or schemer, but an enthusiast as evidently convinced of 
the justice as of the certainty of the ultimate triumph of the 
cause. 

At Chicago I went to the monster meeting at which Speaker 
Colfax addressed the Brotherhood ; at Buffalo I was present 
at the " armed picnic " which gave the Canadian Government 
so much trouble. On Lake Michigan I went on board a 
Fenian ship ; in N^ew York I had a conversation with an ex- 
rebel officer, a long-haired Georgian, who was wearing the 
Fenian uniform of green and gold in the public streets. The 
conclusion to which I came was that the Brotherhood has the 
support of ninety-nine hundredths of the Irish in the States. 
As we are dealing not with British, but with English politics 
and life, this is rather a fact to be borne in mind, than a text 
upon which to found a homily ; still, the nature of the Irish 
antipathy to Britain is worth a moment's consideration, and 
the probable effects of it upon the future of the race is a mat- 
ter of the gravest import. 

The Fenians, according to a Chicago member of the Rob- 
erts wing, seek to return to the ancient state of Ireland, of 
which we find the history in the Brehon laws — a communistic 
tenure of land (resembling, no doubt, that of the Don Cos- 
sacks), and a republic or elective kingshij). Such are their 
objects; nothing else will in the least conciliate the Irish in 
America. No abolition of the Establishment, no reform of 



214 Gkeater Britain. 

land-laws, no Parliament on College Green, nothing that En- 
gland can grant while preserving the shadow of union, can 
dissolve the Fenian league. 

All this is true, and yet there is another great Irish nation 
to which, if you turn, you find that conciliation may still avail 
us. The Irish in Ireland are not Fenians in the American 
sense : they hate us, perhaps, but they may be mollified ; they 
are discontented, but they may be satisfied ; customs and prin- 
ciples of law, the natural growth of the Irish mind and the 
Irish soil, can be recognized, and made the basis of legislation, 
without bringing about the disruption of the era23ire. 

The first Irish question that we shall have to set ourselves 
to understand is that of land. Permanent tenure is as natu- 
ral to the Irish, as freeholding to the English peoj^le. All that 
is needed of our statesmen is that they recognize in legislation 
that which they can not but admit in private talk, namely, 
that there may be essential differences between race and race. 

The results of legislation which proceeds upon this basis 
may foUow very slowly upon the change of system, for thea*e 
is at present no nucleus whatever for the feeling of amity 
which we would create. Even the alliance of the Irish poli- 
ticians "with the English Radicals is merely temporary; the 
Irish antipathy to the English does not distinguish between 
Conservative and Radical. Years of good government will 
be needed to create an alliance against which centuries of op- 
pression and wrong-doing protest. We may forget, but the 
Irish will hardly find themselves able to forget at present that, 
while we make New Zealand savages British citizens as well 
as subjects, protect them in the possession of their lands, and 
encourage them to vote at our polling-booths, and take their 
place as constables and officers of the law, our fathers " plant- 
ed" Ireland, and declared it no felony to kill an Irishman on 
his mother-soil. 

In spite of their possession of much political power, and 
of the entire city government of several great towns, the Irish 
in America are neither physically nor morally well off. 
Whatever may be the case at some future day, they still find 
themselves politically in English hands. The very language 
that they are compelled to speak is hateful, even to men who 
know no other. With an impotent spite which would be 



Bkothers. 215 

amusing were it not very sad, a resolution was carried by ac- 
clamation through both houses of the Fenian Congress at 
Philadelphia this year "that the word * English' be unani- 
mously dropped, and that the words ^American language' be 
used in the future." 

From the Cabinet, from Congress, from every office, high 
or low, not controlled by the Fenian vote, the Irish are sys- 
tematically excluded ; but it can not be American public opin- 
ion which has prevented the Catholic Irish from rising, as 
merchants and traders, even in ISTew York. Yet, while there 
are Belfast names high up on the Atlantic side and in San 
Francisco, there are none, from Cork, none from the southern 
countries. It would seem as though the true Irishman wants 
the perseverance to become a successful merchant, and thrives 
best at pure brain-work, or upon land. Three-fourths of the 
Irish in America remain in towns, losing the attachment to the 
soil which is the strongest characteristic of the Irish in Ireland, 
and finding no new home: disgusted at their exclusion in 
America from political life and power, it is these men who 
turn to Fenianism as a relief. Through drink, through gam- 
bling, and the other vices of homeless, thriftless men, they are 
soon reduced to beggary ; and, moral as they are by nature, 
the Irish are nevertheless supplying America with that which 
she never before possessed — a criminal and pauper class. Of 
10,000 people sent to jail each year in Massachusetts, 6000 are 
Irish-born; in Chicago, out of the 3598 convicts of the last 
year, only 84 were native-born Americans. 

To the Americans, Fenianism has many aspects. The 
greater number hate the Irish, but sympathize profoundly with 
Ireland. Many are so desirous of seeing republicanism prevail 
throughout the world that they support the Irish republic in 
any way, except, indeed, by taking its paper-money, and look 
upon its establishment as a first step toward the erection of a 
free government that shall include England and Scotland as 
well. Some think the Fenians will burn the Capitol and rob 
the banks : some regard them with satisfaction, or the reverse, 
from the religious point of view. One of the latter kind of 
lookers-on said to me, " I was glad to see the Fenian move- 
ment, not that I wish success to the Brotherhood as against 
you English, but because I rejoice to see among Irishmen a 



216 Greater Britain. 

powerful centre of resistance to the Catholic Church. We, 
in this country, were being delivered over, bound hand and 
foot, to the Roman Church, and these Fenians, by their power 
and their violence against the priests, have divided the Irish 
camp, and rescued us." The unfortunate Canadians, for their 
part, ask why they should be shot and robbed because Britain 
maltreats the Irish ; but we must not forget that the Fenian 
raid on Canada was an exact repetition, almost on the same 
ground, of the St. Alban's raid into the American territory dur- 
ing the rebellion. 

The Fenians would be as absolutely without strength in 
America as they are without credit, were it not for the anti- 
British traditions of the Democratic party, and the rankling 
of the Alabama question, or, rather, of the remembrance of 
our general conduct during the rebellion, in the hearts of the 
republicans. It is imjDossible to spend much time in New En- 
gland without becoming aware that the people of the six 
N'orth-eastern States love us from the heart. IsTothing but 
this can explain the character of their feeling toward us on 
these Alabama claims. That we should refuse an arbitration 
uj)on the whole question is to them inexplicable, and they 
grieve with wondering sorrow at our perversity. 

It is not here that the legal question need be raised ; for 
observers of the present position of the English race it is 
enough that there exists between Britain and America a bar 
to perfect friendship — a ground for future quarrel — upon 
which we refuse to allow an all-embracing arbiti'ation. We 
allege that we are the best judges of a certain portion of the 
case, that our dignity would be compromised by arbitration 
upon these points; but such dignity must always be com- 
promised by arbitration, for common friends are called in only 
when each party to the dispute has a case in the justice of 
which his dignity is bound up. Arbitration is resorted to as a 
means of avoiding wars ; and, dignity or no dignity, every thing 
that can cause war is proper matter for arbitration. What 
even if some little dignity be lost by the affair, in addition to 
that which has been lost already ? No such loss can be set 
against the frightful hurtfulness to the race and to the cause 
of freedom, of war between Britain and America. 

The question comes plainly enough to this point : We say 



Brotheks. 217 

we are right ; America says we are wrong ; they offer arbi- 
tration, which we refuse upon a point of etiquette — ^for on that 
ground we decline to refer to arbitration a point which to 
America appears essential. It looks to the World as though 
we ojffer to submit to the umpire chosen those points only on 
which we are already prepared to admit that we are in the 
wrong. America asks us to submit, as we should do in pri- 
vate life, the whole correspondence on which the quarrel 
stands. Even if we, better instructed in the precedents of in- 
ternational law than were the Americans, could not but be in 
the right, still, as we know that intelligent and able men in the 
United States think otherwise, and would fancy their cause the 
just one in a war which might arise upon the difficulty, surely 
there is ground for arbitration. It would be to the eternal 
disgrace of civilization that we should set to work to cut our 
brothers' throats upon a point of etiquette ; and by declining 
on the ground of honor to discuss these claims, we are com- 
promising that honor in the eyes of all the world. 

In democracies such as America or France, every citizen 
feels an insult to his country as an insult to himself. The Al- 
abama question is in the mouth or in the heart — ^which is 
worse — of every American who talks with an Englishman in 
England or America. 

All nations commit at times the error of acting as though 
they think that every people on earth except themselves are 
unanimous in their policy. Neglecting the race distinctions 
and the class distinctions which in England are added to the 
universal essential differences of minds, the Americans are con- 
vinced that, during the late war, we thought as one man, and 
that, in this present matter of the Alabama claims, we stand 
out and act as a united people. 

A ^N'ew Yorker with whom I staid at Quebec— a shrewd 
but kindly fellow — was an odd instance of the American inca- 
pacity to understand the British nation which almost equals 
our own in ability to comprehend America. Kind and hospit- 
able to me, as is any American to every Englishman in all 
times and places, he detested British policy, and obstinately 
refused to see that there is an England larger than Downing 
Street, a nation outside Pall MaU. " England was with the 
rebels throughout the war." " Excuse me ; our ruling classes 

K 



218 Greater Britain. 

were so, j^erhaps, but our rulers don't represent us any more 
than your 39th Congress represents George Washington." In 
America, where Congress does fairly represent the nation, and 
where there has never been less than a quarter of the body fa- 
vorable to any policy which half the nation supported, men 
can not understand that there should exist a country which 
thinks one way, but, through her rulers, speaks another. We 
may disown the national policy, but we suffer, for it. 

The hospitality to any Englishman of the American En- 
gland-hater is extraordinary. An old Southerner in Richmond 
said to me, in a breath, " I'd go and live in England if I didn't 
hate it as I do. England, sir, betrayed us in the most scoun- 
drelly way — talked of sympathy with the South, and stood by 
to see us swallowed up. I hate England, sir ! Come and stay 

a week with me at my place in County. Going South 

to-day ? Well, then, you return this way next week. Come 
then ! Come on Saturday week." 

When we ask, " Why do you press the Alabama claims 
against us, and not the Florida, the Georgia, and the Rappa- 
hannock claims against the French ?" the answer is, " Because 
we don't care about the French, and what they do and think ; 
besides, we owe them some courtesy after l)undling them out 
of Mexico in the way we did." But in truth there is among 
Americans an exa,ggerated estimate of the offensive powers 
of Great Britain; and such is the jealousy of young nations, 
that this exaggeration becomes of itself a cause of danger. 
Were the Americans as fully convinced, as we ourselves are, 
of our total incapacity to carry on a land- war with the United 
States on the western side of the Atlantic, the bolder spirits 
among them would cease to feel themselves under an assumed 
necessity to show us our own weakness and their own strength. 

The chief reason why America finds much to offend her in 
our conduct is that she cares for the opinion of no other peo- 
ple than the English. America, before the terrible blow to 
her confidence and love that our conduct during the rebellion 
gave, used morally to lean on England. Happily for herself, 
she is now emancipated from the mental thraldom ; but she 
still yearns toward our kindly friendship. A Napoleonic sen- 
ator harangues, a French paper declaims against America and 
Americans ; who cares ? But a Times leader, or a speech in 



Brothees. 219 

Parliament from a minister of the Crown cuts to the heart, 
wounding terribly. A nation, like an individual, never quar- 
rels with a stranger ; there must be love at bottom for even 
querulousness to arise/ While I was in Boston, one of the 
foremost writers of America said to me in conversation, " I 
have no son, but I had a nephew of my own name ; a grand 
fellow ; young, handsome, winning in his ways, full of family 
afcections, an ardent student. He felt it his duty to go to the 
front as a private in one of our regiments of Massachusetts 
volunteers, and was promoted for bravery to a captaincy. All 
of us here looked on him as a l^ew England Philip Sidney, the 
type of all that was manly, chivalrous, and noble. The very 
day that I received news of his being killed in leading his 
company against a regiment, I was forced by my duties here 
to read a leader in one of your chief papers upon the officering 
of our army, in which it was more than hinted that our troops 
consisted of German cut-throats and pot-house Irish, led by 
sharpers and broken politicians. Can you wonder at my be- 
ing bitter ?" 

That there must be in America a profound feeling of affec- 
tion for our country is shown by the avoidance of war when 
we recognized the rebels as belligerents, and again, at the time 
of the " Trent " affair, when the surface-cry was overwhelm- 
ingly for battle, and the Cabinet only able to tide it over by 
promising the "West war with England as soon as the rebellion 
was put down. " One war at a time, gentlemen," said Lincoln. 
The man who, of all in America, had most to lose by war with 
England, said to me of the " Trent " affair, " I was written to by 

C to do all I could for peace. I wrote him back that if 

our Attorney-general decided that our seizure of the men was 
lawful, I would spend my last dollar in the cause." 

The Americans, everywhere affectionate toward the indi- 
vidual Englishman, make no secret of their feeling that the 
first advances toward a renewal of the national friendship 
ought to come from us. They might remind us that our Ma- 
ori subjects have a proverb, " Let friends settle their disputes 
as friends." 



220 Greater Britain. 



CHAPTER XXVIII. 

AMEKICA. 

We are coasting again, gliding through cahn, blue waters, 
watching the dolphins as they play, and the boobies as they 
fly, stroke and stroke, with the paddles of the ship. On the 
right mountains rise through the warm misty air, and form a 
long towering line upon the upper skies. Hanging high above 
us are the volcano of fire and that of water — twin menacers 
of Guatemala City. In the sixteenth century the water- 
mountain drowned it ; in the eighteenth it was burnt by the 
fire-hiU. Since then the city has been shaken to pieces by 
earthquakes, and of sixty thousand men and women, hardly 
one escaped. Down the valley, between the peaks, we have 
through the mahogany groves an exquisite distant view to- 
ward the city. Once more passing on, we get peeps, now of 
West Honduras, and now of the island coffee plantations of 
Costa Kica. The heat is terrible. It was just here, if we are 
to believe Drake, that he fell in with a shower so hot and 
scalding that each drop burnt its hole through his men's 
clothes as they hung up to dry. " Steep stories," it is clear, 
were known before the plantation of America. 

Now that the time has come for a leave-taking of tPie con- 
tinent, we can begin to reflect upon facts gleaned during visits 
to twenty-nine of the forty-five Territories and States — twenty- 
nine empires the size of Spain. 

A man may see American countries, from the pine-wastes 
of Maine to the slopes of the Sierra ; may talk with American 
men and women, from the sober citizens of Boston to Digger 
Indians in California ; may eat of American dishes, from jerked 
buffalo in Colorado to clam-bakes on the shores near Salem ; 
and yet, from the time he first " smells the molasses " at 
Nantucket light-ship to the moment vrhen the pilot quits him 
at the Golden Gate, may have no idea of an America. You 
may have seen the East, the South, the West, the Pacific States, 
and yet have failed to find America. It is not till you have 
left her shores that her image grows up m the mind. 



America. • 221 

The first thing that strikes the Englishman just landed in 
New York is the apparent Latinization of the English in 
America ; but before he leaves the country, he comes to see 
that this is at most a local fact, and that the true moral of 
America is the vigor of the English race — the defeat of the 
cheaper by the dearer peoples, the victory of the man whose 
food costs four shillings a day over the man whose food costs 
four pence. Excluding the Atlantic cities, the English in 
America are absorbing the Germans and the Celts, destroying 
the Red Indians, and checking the advance of the Chinese. 

The Saxon is the only extirpating race on earth. Up to 
the commencement of the now inevitable destruction of the 
Ked Indians of Central North America, of the Maories, and 
of the Australians by the English colonists, no numerous race 
had ever been blotted out by an invader. The Danes and 
Saxons amalgamated with the Britons, the Goths and Bur- 
gundians with the Gauls : the Spaniards not only never anni- 
hilated a people, but have themselves been all but completely 
expelled by the Indians, in Mexico and South America. The 
Portuguese in Ceylon, the Dutch in Java, the French in Canada 
and Algeria, have conquered but not killed off the native peo- 
ples. Hitherto it has been nature's rule that the race that 
peopled a country in the earliest historic days should people it 
to the end of time. The American problem is this : Does the 
law, in a modified shape, hold good, in spite of the destruction 
of the native population ? It is true that the negroes, now 
that they are free, are commencing slowly to die out — that the 
New Englanders are dying fast, and their places being sup- 
plied by immigrants ? Can the English in America, in the 
long run, survive the common fate of all migrating races ? Is 
it true that, if the American settlers continue to exist, it will 
be at the price of being no longer English, but Red Indian ? 
It is certain that the English families long in the land have 
the features of the extirpated race ; on the other hand, in the 
negroes there is at present no trace of any change, save in 
their becoming dark brown instead of black. 
• The Maories — an immigrant race — ^were dying off in New 
Zealand when we landed there. The Red Indians of Mexico 
— another immigrant people — ^had themselves undergone de- 
cline, numerical and moral, when we first became acquainted 



222 Greater Britain. 

with them. Are we English in turn to degenerate abroad, 
under pressure of a great natural law forbidding change ? It 
is easy to say that the English in Old England are not a na- 
tive, but an immigrant race ; that they show no symptoms of 
decline. There, however, the change was sHght, the distance 
short, the difference of climate small. 

The rapidity of the disappearance of physical type is equal- 
led at least, if not succeeded, by that of the total alteration 
of the moral characteristics of the immigrant races — the en- 
tire destruction of eccentricity, in short. The change that 
comes over those among the Irish who do not remain in the 
great towns is not greater than that which overtakes the En- 
glish hand-workers, of whom some thousands reach America 
each year. Gradually settling down on land, and finding them- 
selves lost in a sea of intelligence, and freed from the insj)ir- 
ing obstacles of antiquated institutions and class prejudice, the 
English handicraftsman, ceasing to be roused to aggressive 
Radicalism by the opposition of sinister interests, merges into 
the contented homestead settler or adventurous backwoods- 
man. Greater even than this revolution of character is that 
which falls upon the Celt. IsTot only is it a fact known alike 
to physiologists and statisticians, that the children of Irish 
parents born in America are, physically, not Irish, but Ameri- 
cans, but the like is true of the moral type : the change in this 
is at least as sweeping. The son of Fenian Pat and bright- 
eyed Biddy is the normal, gaunt American, quick of thought, 
but slow of speech, whom we have begun to recognize as the 
latest production of the Saxon race, when housed upon the 
Western prairies, or in the pine woods of New England. 

For the moral change in the British workmen it is not 
difficult to account ; the man who will leave country, home, 
and friends, to seek new fortunes in America, is essentially 
not an ordinary man. As a rule, he is above the average in 
intelligence, or, if defective in this point, he makes up for 
lack of wit by the possession of concentrativeness and energy. 
Such a man will have pushed himself to the front in his club, 
his union, or his shop, before he emigrates. In England he 
is somebody ; in America he finds all hands contented, or, if 
not this, at all events too busy to complain of such ills as they 
profess to labor under. Among contented men, his equals 



Amekica. 223 

both in intelligence and ambition, in a country of perfect 
freedom of speech, of manners, of laws, and of society, the 
occupation of his mind is gone, and he comes to think him- 
self what others seem to think him — a nobody ; a man who 
no longer is a living force. He settles upon land ; and when 
the wdrld knows him no more, his children are happy corn- 
growers in his stead. 

The shape of N'orth America makes the existence of dis- 
tinct peoples within her limits almost impossible. An upturn- 
ed bowl, with a mountain-rim, from which the streams run in- 
ward toward the centre, she must fuse together all the races 
that settle within her borders, and the fusion must now be in 
an English mould. 

There are homogeneous foreign populations in several por- 
tions of the United States ; not only the Irish and Chinese, 
at whose prospects we have already glanced, but also Ger- 
mans in Pennsylvania, Spanish in Florida, French in Louisiana 
and at Sault de St. Marie. In Wisconsin there is a Nor- 
wegian population of over a hundred thousand, retaining 
their own language and their own architecture, and present- 
ing the appearance of a tough morsel for the English to di- 
gest; at the same time, the Swedes were the first settlers of 
Delaware and New Jersey, and there they have disappeared. 

Milwaukee is a Norwegian town. The houses are narrow 
and high, the windows many, with circular tops ornamented 
in wood or dark-brown stone, and a heavy wooden cornice 
crowns the front. The churches have the wooden bulb and 
spire which are characteristic of the Scandinavian public build- 
ings. The Norwegians will not mix with other races, and in- 
variably flock to spots where there is already a large popula- 
tion speaking their own tongue. Those who enter Canada 
generally become dissatisfied with the country, and pass on 
into Wisconsin or Minnesota, but the Canadian Government 
has now under its consideration a plan for founding a Nor- 
wegian colony on Lake Huron. The numbers of this people 
are not so great as to make it important to inquire whether 
they will ever merge into the general population. Analogy 
would lead us to expect that they will be absorbed ; their ex- 
istence is not historical, like that of the French in Lower 
Canada. 



224 Greater BrItaiit. 

From Burlington, in Iowa, I had visited a spot the history 
of which is typical of the development of America — ISTauvoo. 
Founded in 1840 by Joe Smith, the Mormon city stood upon 
a bluff overhanging the Des Moines Rapids of the Mississippi, 
presenting on the land-side the aspect of a gentle, gi-aceful 
slope surmounted by a plain. After the fanatical pioneers o*f 
Endish civilization had been driven from the city and their 
temple burned, there came Cabet's Icarian band, who tried to 
found a new France in the desert; but in 1856 the leader 
died, and his people dispersed themselves about the States of 
Iowa and Missouri. Next came the English settlers, active, 
thriving, regardless of tradition, and ISTauvoo is entering on a 
new life as the capital of a wine-growing country. I found 
Cahet and the Mormons alike forgotten. The ruins of the 
temple have disappeared, and the huge stones have been used 
up in cellars, built to contain the Hock — a pleasant wine, like 
Zeltinger. 

The bearing upon religion of the gradual destruction of 
race is of great moment to the world. Christianity will gain 
by the change ; but which of its many branches will receive 
support is a question which only admits of an imperfect an- 
swer. Arguing d priori, we should expect to find that, on 
the one hand, a tendency toward unity would manifest itself, 
taking the shape, perhaps, of a gain of strength by the Catholic 
and Anglican churches ; on the other hand, there would be 
a contrary and still stronger tendency toward an infinite mul- 
tiplication of beliefs, till millions of men and women would 
become each of them his own Church. Coming to the actual 
cases in which we can trace the tendencies that commence to 
manifest themselves, we find that in America the Anglican 
Church is gaining ground, especially on the Pacific side, and 
that the Catholics do not seem to meet with any such success 
as we should have looked for ; retaining, indeed, their hold- 
over the Irish women and a portion of the men, and having 
their historic French branches in Louisiana and in Canada, but 
not, unless it be in the cities of New York and Philadelphia, 
making much way among the English. 

Between San Francisco and Chicago, for religious purposes 
the most cosmopoHtan of cities, we have to draw distinctions. 
In the Pacific city, the disturbing cause is the presence of 



America. , 225 

"New Yorkers ; in the metropolis of the Korth-western States, 
it is the dominance of New England ideas : still, we shall find 
no two cities so free from local color, and from the influence 
of race. The result of an examination is not encouraging : in 
both cities there is much external show in the shape of Church 
attendance ; in neither does religion strike its roots deeply 
into the hearts of the citizens, except so far as it is alien and 
imported. 

The Spiritualist and Unitarian Churches are both of them 
in Chicago extremely strong : they support newspapers and 
periodicals of their own, and are led by men of remarkable 
ability and energy, but they are not the less Cambridge Uni- 
tarianism, Boston Spiritualism ; there is nothing of the North- 
west about them. In San Francisco, on the other hand, An- 
glicanism is prospering, but it is New York Episcopalianism, 
sustained by immigrants and money from the East; in no 
sense is it a Californian Churph. 

Throughout America the multiplication of churches is 
rapid, but, among the native-born Americans, Supernaturalism 
is advancing with great strides. The Shakers are strong in 
thought, the Spiritualists in wealth and numbers ; Communism 
gains ground, but not Polygamy — the Mormon is a purely 
European Church. 

There is just now progressing in America a great move- 
ment, headed by the " Radical Unitarians," toward " free re- 
ligion," or church without creed. The leaders deny that 
there is sufficient security for the spread of religion in each 
man's individual action; they desire collective work by aU 
free-thinkers and liberal religionists in the direction of truth 
and purity of life. Christianity is higher than dogma, we are 
told : there is no way out of infinite multiplication of creeds 
but by their total extirpation. Oneness of purpose and a 
common love for truth form the members' only tie. Elder 
Frederick Evans said to me, "All truth forms part of Shaker- 
ism;" but these free religionists assure us that in all truth 
consists their sole religion. 

The distinctive feature of these American philosophical 
and religious systems is their gigantic width : for instance, 
every human being who admits that disembodied spirits may. 
in any way hold intercourse with dwellers upon earth, what- 

K2 



226 GREATER Britain. 

ever else he may believe or disbelieve, is claimed by the Spir- 
itualists as a member of their Church. They tell us that by 
"Spiritualism they understand whatever bears relation to 
spirit ;" their system embraces all existence, brute, human, and 
divine ; in fact, " the real man is a spirit." According to these 
ardent proselytizers, every poet, every man with a grain of 
imagination in his nature, is a " Spiritualist." They claim 
Plato, Socrates, Milton, Shakspeare, Washington Irving, 
Charles Dickens, Luther, Melanchthon, Paul, Stephen, the 
whole of the Hebrew prophets, Homer, and John Wesley, 
among the members of their Church. They have lately can- 
onized new saints : St. Confucius, St. Theodore (Parker), St. 
Ralph (Waldo Emerson), St. Emma (Hardinge), all figure in 
their calendar. It is a noteworthy fact that the saints are 
mostly resident in 'New England. 

The tracts published at the Spiritual Clarion ofiice, Au- 
burn, Kew York, put forward Spiritualism as a religion which 
is to stand toward existing churches as did Christianity to- 
ward Judaism, and announce a new dispensation to the peo- 
ples of the earth " who have sown their wild oats in Chris- 
tianity," but they spell supersede with a " c." 

This strange religion has long since left behind the rap- 
pings and table-turnings in which it took its birth. The se- 
cret of its success is that it supplies to every man the satisfac- 
tion of the universal craving for the supernatural in any form 
in which he will receive it. The Spiritualists claim two mil- 
lions of active believers and five million " favorers " in Amer- 
ica. 

The presence of a large German population is thought by 
some to have an important bearing on the religious future of 
America, but the Germans have hitherto kept themselves apart 
from the intellectual progress of the nation. They for the 
most part withdraw from towns, and retaining their language 
and supporting local papers of their own, live out of the world 
of American literature, politics, and thought, taking, however, 
at rare intervals, a patriotic part in national affairs, as was 
notably the case at the time of the late rebellion. Living thus 
by themselves, they have even less influence upon American 
religious thought than have the Irish, who, speaking the En- 
glish tongue, and dwelling almost exclusively in towns, are 



America. 227 

brought more into contact with the daily life of the republic. 
The Germans in America are in the main pure materialists, 
under a certain show of deism ; but hitherto there has been 
no alliance between them and the powerful Chicago Radical 
Unitarians — difference of language having thus far proved a 
bar to the formation of a league which would otherwise have 
been inevitable. 

On the whole, it would seem that for the moment religious 
prospects are not bright ; the tendency is rather toward intense 
and unheathily developed feeling in the few, and subscription to 
some one of the Episcopalian Churches — Catholic, Anglican, 
or Methodist— among the many, coupled with real indifference. 
Neither the tendency to unity of creeds nor that toward infi- 
nite multiplication of beliefs has yet made that progress which 
abstract speculation would have led us to expect. So far as 
we can judge from the few facts before us, there is much like- 
lihood that multiplication will in the future prove too strong 
for unity. 

After all, there is not in America a greater wonder than the 
Englishman himself, for it is to this continent that you must 
come to find him in full possession of his powers. Two hun- 
dred and fifty millions of people speak or are ruled by those 
who speak the English tongue, and inhabit a third of the 
habitable globe ; but at the present rate of increase, in sixty 
years there will be two hundred and fifty millions of English- 
men dwelling in the United States alone. America has some- 
what grown since the time when it was gravely proposed to 
call her AUeghania, after a chain of mountains which, looking 
from this western side, may be said to skirt her eastern bor- 
der, and the loftiest peaks of which are but half the height of 
the very passes of the Rocky Mountains. 

America is becoming, not English merely, but world-em- 
bracing in the variety of its type ; and as the English element 
has given language and history to that land, America offers the 
English race the moral directorship of the globe, by ruling 
mankind through Saxon institutions and the English tongue. 
Through America England is speaking to the world. 



PAET II.— POLYNESIA. 



CHAPTER I. 

PITCAIEISr ISLAND. 



Panama is a picturesque, time-worn Spanish city, that rises 
abruptly from the sea in a confused pile of decaying bastions 
and decayed cathedrals, while a dense jungle of mangrove and 
bamboo threatens to bury it in rich greenery^ The forest is 
filled with baboons and lizards of gigantic size, and is gay 
with the bright plumage of the toucans and macaws, while, 
within the walls, every house-top bears its living load of hide- 
ous turkey-buzzards, foul- winged and .bloodshot-eyed. 

It was the rainy season (which here, indeed, lasts for three- 
quarters of the year), and each day was an alternation of 
shower-bath, and vapor-bath with sickly sun. On the first 
night of my stay there was a lunar rainbow, which I went on 
to the roof of the hotel to watch. The misty sky was white 
with the reflected Bsfht of the hidden moon, which was ob- 
scured by an inky cloud, that seemed a tunnel through the 
heavens. In a few minutes I was driven from my post by 
the tropical rain. 

At the railway station I parted from my Calif ornian friends, 
who were bound for Aspinwall, and thence by steamer to New 
York. A stranger scene it has not often been my fortune to 
behold. There can not have been less than a thousand natives, 
wearing enormous hats and little else, and selling every thing 
from linen suits to the last French novel. A tame jaguar, a 
pelican, parrots, monkeys, pearls, shells, flowers, green cocoa- 
nuts and turtles, mangoes and wild dogs, were among the 
things for sale. The station was guarded by the army of the 
Republic of New Granada, consisting of five ofiicers, a bugler, 
a drummer, and nineteen men. Six of the men wore red 



.PiTCAiRN Island. 229 

trowsers and dirty shirts for Tiniform ; the rest dressed as 
they pleased, which was generally in Adamic style. Not even 
the officers had shoes ; and of the twenty-one men, one was a 
full-blooded Indian, some ten were negroes, and the remainder 
nondescripts, but among them was, of course, an Irishman from 
Cork or Kilkenny. After the train had started, the troops 
formed, and marched briskly through the town, the drummer 
trotting along some twenty yards before the company, French 
fashion, and beating the retraite. The French invalids from 
Acapulco, who were awaiting in Panama the arrival of an im- 
perial frigate at Aspinwall, stood in the streets to see the New 
Granadians pass, twirling their mustaches, and smiling grim- 
ly. One old drum-major, lean and worn with fever, turned 
to me, and, shrugging his shoulders, pointed to his side : the 
Granadians had their bayonets tied oil with string. 

Whether Panama will continue to hold its present position 
as the "gate of the Pacific" is som.ewhat doubtful: Nicara- 
gua offers greater advantages to the English, Tehuantepec to 
the American traders. The Gulf of Panama, and the ocean 
for a great distance to the westward from its mouth, are no- 
torious for their freedom from all breezes : the gulf lies, in- 
deed, in the equatorial belt of calms, and sailing-vessels can 
never make much use of the port of Panama. Aspinwall or 
Colon, on the Atlantic side, has no true port whatever. As 
long, however, as the question is merely one of railroad and 
steam-ship traffic, Panama may hold its own against the other 
Isthmus cities ; but when the canal is cut, the selected spot 
must be one that sTiall be beyond the reach of calms — in Nic- 
aragua or Mexico. 

From Panama I sailed in one of the ships of the New Co- 
lonial Line for Wellington, in New Zealand — the longest steam- 
voyage in the world. Our course was to be a " great circle " 
to Pitcairn Island, and another great circle thence to Cape 
Palliser, near Wellington — a distance in all of some 6600 miles, 
but our actual course was nearer TOOO. When off the Gala- 
pagos Islands, we met the cold southerly wind and water, 
known as the Chilian current, and crossed the equator in a 
breeze which forced us all to wear great-coats, and to dream 
that, instead of entering the southern hemisphere, we had 
come by mistake within the arctic circle. 



230 Greater Britain. 

After traversing lonely and hitherto unknown seas, and 
looking in vain for a new guano island, on the sixteenth day 
we worked out the ship's position at noon with more than 
usual care, if that were possible, and found that in four hours 
we ought to be at Pitcairn Island. At half-past two o'clock 
land was sighted right ahead, and by four o'clock we were in 
the bay, such as it is, at Pitcairn. 

Although at sea there was a calm, the surf from the 
ground-swell beat heavily upon the shore, and we were fain to 
content ourselves with the view of the island from our decks. 
It consists of a single volcanic peak, hung with an arras of 
green creeping plants, passion-flowers, and trumpet-vines. As 
for the people, they came off to us dancing over the seas in 
their canoes, and bringing us green oranges and bananas, 
while a huge union-jack was run up on their flag-staff by those 
who remained on shore. 

As the first man came on deck, he rushed to the captain, 
and, shaking hands violently, cried, in pure English, entirely 
free from accent, "How do you do, captain? How's Vic- 
toria ?" There was no disrespect in the omission of the title 
" Queen ;" the question seemed to come from the heart. The 
bright-eyed lads, Adams and Young, descendants of the Boun- 
ty mutineers, who had been the first to climb our sides, an- 
nounced the coming of Moses Young, the " magistrate " of the 
isle, who presently boarded us in state. He was a grave and 
gentlemanly man, English in appearance, but somewhat slight- 
ly built, as were, indeed, the lads. The magistrate came 
off to lay before the captain the facts relating to a feud 
which exists between two parties of the islanders, and upon 
which they require arbitratiouc He had been under the im- 
pression that we were a man-of-war, as we had fired two guns 
on entering the bay ; and being received by our officers, who 
wore the cap of the Naval Reserve, he continued in the belief 
till the captain explained what the " Rakaia " was, and why 
she had called at Pitcairn. 

The case which the captain was to have heard judicially 
was laid before us for our advice while the flues of the ship 
were being cleaned. When the British Government removed 
the Pitcairn Islanders to Norfolk Island, no return to the old 
home was contemplated : but the indolent half-castes found 



PiTCAiRN Island. 231 

the task of keeping the !N"orfolk Island convict-roads in good 
repair one heavier than they cared to perform, and fifty-two 
of them have lately come back to Pitcairn. A widow who re- 
turned with the others claims a third of the whole island as 
having been the property of her late husband, and is support- 
ed in her demand by haif the islanders, while Moses Young 
and the remainder of the people admit the facts, but assert 
that the desertion of the island was complete, and operated as 
an entire abandonment of titles which the reoccupation can 
not revive. The success of the woman's claim, they say, 
would be the destruction of the prosperity of Pitcairn. 

The case would be an extremely curious one if it had to be 
decided upon legal grounds, for it would raise complicated 
questions both on the nature of British citizenship and the 
character of the " occupation " title ; but it is probable that 
the islanders will abide by the decision of the Governor of 
N'ew South Wales, to which colony they consider themselves 
in some degree attached. 

When we had drawn up a case to be submitted to Sir John 
Young, our captain made a commercial treaty with the magis- 
trate, who agreed to supply the ships of the new line, when- 
ever daylight allowed them to call at Pitcairn, with oranges, 
bananas, ducks, and fowls, for which he was to receive cloth 
and tobacco in exchange, tobacco being the money of the 
Polynesian Archipelago. Mr. Young told us that his people 
had thirty sheep, which were owned by each of the families 
in turn, the household taking care of them and receiving the 
profits for one year. Water, he said, sometimes falls short in 
the island, but they then make use of the juice of the green 
cocoanut. Their school is excellent ; all the children can read 
and write, and in the election of magistrates they have female 
suffrage. 

When we went on deck again to talk to the younger men, 
Adams asked us a new question : " Have you a Sunday at 
Some or a British Workman V Our books and papers hav- 
ing been ransacked, Moses Young prepared to leave the ship, 
taking with him presents from the stores. Besides the cloth, 
tobacco, hats, and linen, there was a bottle of brandy — given 
■ for medicine, as the islanders are strict teetotallers. While 
Young held the bottle in his hand, afraid to trust the lads 



232 Greater Britain. 

with it, Adams read the label and cried out, " Brandy ? How 
much for a dose ? . . . . Oh yes ! all right — I know : it's 
good for the women?" When they at last left the ship's 
side, one of the canoes was filled with a crinoline and blue- 
silk dress for Mrs. Young, and another with a red-and-brown 
tartan for Mrs. Adams, both given \)j lady passengers, while 
the lads went ashore in dust-coats and smoking-caps. 

IsTow that the French, with their singular habit of eveiy- 
where annexing countries which other colonizing nations have 
rejected, are rapidly occupying all the Polynesian groups ex- 
cept the only ones that are of value, namely, the Sandwich 
Islands and New Zealand, Pitcairn becomes of some interest 
as a solitary British post on the very border of the French 
dominions, and it has for us the stronger claim to notice, which 
is raised by the fact that it has figured for the last few years 
on the wrong side of our British budget. 

As we stood out from the bay into the lonely seas, the 
island peak showed a black outline against a pale-green sky, 
but in the west the heavy clouds that in the Pacific never 
fail to cumber the horizon were glowing with a crimson cast 
by the now-set sun, and the dancing wavelets were tinted with 
reflected hues. 

The "scarlet shafts," which poets have ascribed to the 
tropical sunrise, are common at sunseiJ in the South Pacific. 
Almost every night the reclining sun, sinking behind the 
clouds, throws rays across the sky — not yellow, as in Europe 
and America, but red or rosy pink. On the night after leav- 
ing Pitcairn, I saw a still grander effect of light and color. 
The sun had set, and in the west the clear greenish sky was 
hidden by pitch-black thunder-clouds. Through these were 
crimson caves. 

On the twenty-ninth day of our voyage we sighted the 
frowning cliffs of Palliser, where the bold bluff, coming sheer 
down three thousand feet, receives the full shock of the South 
Seas — a fitting introduction to the grand scenery of New 
Zealand; and within a few hours we were running up the 
great sea-lake of Port Nicholson toward long lines of steam- 
ers at a wharf, behind which were the cottages of Wellington, 
the capital. 

To me, comins: from San Francisco and the Nevadan 



HOEITIKA. 233 

towns, Wellington appeared very English, and extremely- 
quiet ; the town is sunny and still, but with a holiday look ; 
indeed, I could not help fancying that it was Sunday. A cer- 
tain haziness as to what was the day of the week prevailed 
among the passengers and crew, for we had arrived upon our 
Wednesday, the New Zealand Thursday, and so, without los- 
ing an hour, lost a day, which, unless by going round the 
world the other way, can never be regained. The bright 
colors of the painted wooden houses, the clear air, the rose- 
beds, and the emerald-green grass, are the true cause of the 
holiday look of the New Zealand towns, and Wellington is 
the gayest of them all ; for, owing to the frequency of earth- 
quakes, the towns-folk are not allowed to build in brick or 
stone. The natives say that once in every month " Ruaimoko 
turns himself," and sad things follow to the shaken earth. 

It was now November, the New Zealand spring, and the 
outskirts of Wellington were gay with the cherry-trees in 
full fruiting and English dog-roses in full bloom, while" on 
every road-side bank the gorse blazed in its coat of yellow: 
there was, too, to me, a singular charm in the bright green 
turf, after the tawny grass of California! 

Without making a long halt, I started for the South Island, 
first steaming across Cook's Straits, and up Queen Charlotte 
Sound to Picton, and then through the French Pass — a narrow 
passage filled with fearful whirlpools — to Nelson, a gem-like 
little Cornish village. After a day's "cattle-branding" with 
an old college friend at his farm in the valley of the Maitai, I 
sailed again for the south, laying for a night in Massacre Bay 
to avoid the worst of a tremendous gale, and then coasting 
down to the Buller and Hokitika — the new gold-fields of the 
colonies. 



CHAPTER II. 

HOKITIKA. 

Placed in the very track of storms, and opened to the 
sweep of rolling seas from every quarter, exposed to waves 
that run from pole to pole, or from South Africa to Cape 
Horn, the shores of New Zealand are famed for swell and 



160 



]?0 



172 



174 




1681,. Gr 170 



172 



17* 



176 



J78 



HOKITIKA. 285 

surf, and her western rivers for the danger of their bars. In- 
surances at Melbourne are five times as high for the voyage 
to Hokitika as for the longer cruise to Brisbane. 

In our little steamer of a hundred tons, built to cross the 
bars, we had reached the mouth of the Hokitika River soon 
after dark, but lay all night some ten miles to the south-west 
of the port. As we steamed in the early morning from our 
anchorage, there rose up on the east the finest sunrise view 
on which it has been my fortune to set eyes. 

A hundred miles of the Southern Alps stood out upon a 
pale-blue sky in curves of a gloomy white that were just be- 
ginning to blush with pink, but ended to the southward in a 
cone of fire that stood up from the ocean : it was the snow- 
dome of Mount Cook struck by the rising sun. The ever^ 
green bush, flaming with the crimson of the rata-blooms, 
hung upon the mountain-side, and covered the plain to the 
very margin of the narrow sands with a dense jungle. It 
was one of those sights that haunt men for years, like the 
eyes of Mary in Bellini's Milan picture. 

On the bar, three ranks of waves appeared to stand fixed 
in walls of surf. These huge roUers are sad destroyers of the 
Kew Zealand coasting-ships : a steamer was lost here a week 
before my visit, and the harbor-master's whale-boat dashed in 
pieces, and two men drowned. 

Lashing every thing that was on deck, and battening down 
the hatches in case we should ground in crossing, we prepared 
to run the gauntlet. The steamers often ground for an in- 
stant while in the trough between the waves, and the second 
sea sweeps them from stem to stern, but carries them into the 
still water. Watching our time, we were borne on a great, 
rolling, white-capped, wave into the quiet lakelet that forms 
the harbor, just as the sun, coming slowly up behind the range, 
was firing the Alps from north to south; but it was not till 
we had lain some minutes at the wharf that the sun rose to us 
poor mortals of the sea and plain. Hokitika Bay is strangely 
like the lower portion of the Lago Maggiore, but Mount Rosa 
is inferior to Mount Cook. 

As I walked up from the quay to the town, looking for the 
" Empire " Hotel, which I had heard was the best in Hokitika, 
I spied a boy carrying a bundle of some newspaper. It was 



236 Geeater Britain. 

the early edition for the up-country coaches, but I asked if he 
could spare me a copy. He put one into my hand. "How 
much?" I asked. "A snapper." "A snapper?" "Ay — a 
tizzy." Understanding this more familiar term, I gave him a 
shilling. Instead of " change," he cocked up his knee, slapped 
the shilling down on it, and said " Cry !" I accordingly cried 
" Woman !" and won, he loyally returning the coin, and walk- 
ing off minus a paper. 

When I reached that particular gin-palace which was known 
as the hotel, I found that all the rooms were occupied, but 
that I could, if I pleased, lie down on a deal side-table in the 
billiard-room. In our voyage down the coast from Nelson, 
we had brought for the Buller and for Hokitika a cabin full 
^f cut flowers for bouquets, of which the diggers are extremely 
fond. The fact was pretty enough : the store set upon a sin- 
gle rose — "an English rose-bud" — culled from a plant that 
had been brought from the Old Country in a clipper-ship, was 
still more touching, but the flowers made sleep below impos- 
sible, and it had been blowing too hard for me to sleep on 
deck, so that I was glad to lie down upon my table for an 
hour's rest. The boards were rough and full of cracks, and 
I began to dream that, walking on the landing-stage, I ran 
against a man, who drew his revolver upon me. In wrench- 
ing it from him, I hurt my hand in the lock, and woke to find 
my fingers pinched in one of the chinks of the long table. 
Despairing of further sleej), I started to walk through Hoki- 
tika, and to explore the " clearings " which the settlers are 
making in the bush. 

At Pakihi and the Buller I had already seen the places to 
which the latest gold-digging " rush " had taken place, with 
the result of planting there some thousands of men with noth- 
ing to eat but gold — ^f or diggers, however shrewd, fall always 
an easy prey to those who tell them of spots where gold may 
be had for the digging, and never stop to think how they shall 
live. No attempt is at present made to grow even vegetables 
for the diggers' food : every one is engrossed in the search 
for gold. It is true that the dense jungle is being driven 
back from the diggers' camps by fire and sword, but the clear- 
ing is only made to give room for tents and houses. At the 
Buller I had found the forest, which comes down at present 



HOKITIKA. 2B7 

to the water's edge, and crowds upon the twenty shanties and 
hundred tents and boweries which form the town, smoking 
with fires on every side, and the parrots chattering with 
fright. The fires obstinately refused to spread, but the tall 
feathery trees were falling fast under the axes of some hun- 
dred diggers, who seemed not to have much romantic sympa- 
thy for the sufferings of the tree-ferns they had uprooted, or 
of the passion-flowers they were tearing from the evergreens 
they had embraced. 

The soil about the Fox, the BuUer, the Okitiki, and the 
other west-coast rivers on which gold is found, is a black leaf- 
mould of extraordinary depth and richness ; but in N^ew Zea- 
land, as in America, the poor lands are first occupied by the 
settlers, because the fat soils will pay for the clearing only 
when there is already a considerable population on the land. 
On this west coast it rains nearly all the year, and vegetation 
has such power that " rainy Hokitika " must long continue to 
be fed from Christchurch and from ISTelson, for it is as hard 
to keep the land clear as it is at the first to clear it. 

The profits realized upon ventures from ISTelson to the Gold 
Coast are enormous ; nothing less than fifty per cent, will 
compensate the owners for losses on the bars. The first cat- 
tle imported from Nelson to the Buller fetched at the latter 
place double the price they had cost only two days earlier. One 
result of this maritime usury that was told me by the steward 
of the steamer in which I came down from Nelson is worth re- 
cording for the benefit of the economists. They had on board, 
he said, a stock of spirits sufficient for several trips, but they 
altered their prices according to locality ; from Nelson to the 
Buller they charged Qd. a drink, but, once in the river, the 
price rose to 1^., at which it remained until the ship left port 
upon her return to Nelson, when it fell again to 6d. A drover 
coming down in charge of cattle was a great friend of this 
steward, and the latter confirmed the story which he had told 
me by waking the drover when we were off the Buller bar : 
" Say, mister, if you want a drink, you'd better take it. It'll 
be shilling drinks in five minutes." " 

The Hokitikans flatter themselves that their city is the 
" most rising place " on earth, and it must be confessed that 
if population alone is to be regarded, the rapidity of its growth 



238 Geeater Britain. 

has been amazing. At the time of my visit, one year and a 
half had passed since the settlement was formed by a few dig- 
gers, and it already had a permanent population of ten thou- 
sand, while no less than sixty thousand diggers and their 
friends claimed it for their head-quarters. San Francisco it- 
self did not rise so fast, Melbourne not much faster ; but Hoki- 
tika, it must be remembered, is not only a gold-field port, but 
itself upon the gold-field. It is San Francisco and Placerville 
in one — Ballarat and Melbourne. 

Inferior in its banks and theatres to Virginia City, or even 
Austin, there is one point in which Hokitika surpasses every 
American mining-town that I have seen — the goodness, name- 
ly, of its roads. Working upon them in the bright morning 
sun which this day graced " rainy Hokitika " with its presence, 
were a gang of diggers and sailors, dressed in the clothes 
which every one must wear in a digging-town unless he wish- 
es to be stared at by every passer-by. Even sailors on shore 
" for a run " here wear cord breeches and high, tight-fitting 
boots, often armed with spurs, though, as there are no horses 
except those of the Gold-coast Police, they can not enjoy much 
riding. The gang working on the roads were like the people 
I met about the town — rough, but not ill-looking fellows. To 
my astonishment I saw, conspicuous among their red shirts 
and " jumpers," the blue-and- white uniform of the mounted 
police : and, from the way in which the constables handled 
their loaded rifles, I came to the conclusion that the road- 
menders must be a gang of prisoners. On inquiry, I found 
that all the New Zealand " convicts," including under this 
sweeping title men convicted for mere petty offenses, and sen- 
tenced to hard labor for a month, are made to do good prac- 
tical work upon the roads : so much resistance to the police, 
so much new road made or old road mended. I was reminded 
of the Missourian practice of setting prisoners to dig out the 
stumps that cumbered the streets of the younger towns : the 
sentence on a man for being drunk is said to be that he pull 
up a black- walnut stump ; drunk and disorderly, a large buck- 
eye ; assaulting the sheriff, a tough old hickory root, and so on. 

The hair and beard of the short-sentence " convicts " in 
New Zealand is never cut, and there is nothing hang-dog in 
their looks ; but their faces are often bright, and even happy. 



HOKITIKA. 239 

These cheerful prisoners are for the most part " runners " — 
sailors who have broken their agreements in order to get upon 
the diggings, and who bear their punishment philosophically, 
with the hope of future " finds " before them. 

When the great rush to Melbourne occurred in 1848, ships 
by the hundred were left in the Yarra without a single hand 
to navigate them. N'uggets in the hand would not tempt 
sailors away from the hunt after the nuggets in the busK, 
Ships left Hobson's Bay for Chili with half a dozen hands ; 
and in one case that came within my knowledge, a captain, 
his mate, and three Maories took a brig across the Pacific to 
San Francisco. 

As the morning wore on, I came near seeing something of 
more serious crime than that for which these " runners " were 
convicted. " Sticking-up," as highway robbery is called in 
the colonies, has always been common in Australia and New 
Zealand, but of late the bush-rangers, deserting their old tac- 
tics, have commenced to murder as well as rob. In three 
months of 1866 no less than fifty or sixty murders took place 
in the South Island of New Zealand, all of them committed, 
it was believed, by a gang known as " The Thugs." Mr. 
George Dobson, the Government surveyor, was murdered near 
Hokitika in May, but it was not till November that the gang 
was broken up by the police and volunteers. Levy, KeUy, and 
Burgess, three of the most notorious of the villains, were on 
their trial at Hokitika while I was there, and Sullivan, also a 
member of the band, who had been taken at Nelson, had vol- 
unteered to give evidence against them. Sullivan was to 
come by steamer from the North without touching at the 
BuUer or the Gray ; and, when the ship was signalled, the ex- 
citement of the population became considerable, the diggers 
asserting that Sullivan was not only the basest, but the most 
guilty of all the gang. As the vessel ran across the bar and 
into the bay, the police were marched down to the landing- 
place, and a yelling crowd surrounded them, threatening to 
lynch the informer. When the steamer came alongside the 
wharf Sullivan was not to be seen, and it was soon discovered 
that he had been landed in a whale-boat upon the.outer beach. 
Off rushed the crowd, to intercept the party in the town, but 
they found the jail-gates already shut and barred. 



240 Greater Britain. 

It was hard to say whether it was for Thuggism or for 
turning queen's evidence, that Sullivan was to be lynched : 
crime is looked at here as leniently as it is in Texas. I once 
met a man who had been a coroner at one of the digging- 
towns, who, talking of " old times," said, quietly enough, " Oh 
yes, plenty of work ; we used to malie a good deal of it. 
You see, I was paid by fees, so I used generally to manage to 
hold four or five inquests on each body. Awful rogues my 
assistants were ; I shouldn't like to have some of those men's 
sins to answer for." 

The Gold-coast Police Force, which has been formed to 
put a stop to Thuggism and bush-ranging, is a splendid body 
of cavalry, about which many good stories are told. One dig- 
ger said to me, " Seen our policemen ? We don't have no 
younger sons of British peers among 'em." Another account 
says that none but members of the older English universities 
are admitted to the force. 

There are here upon the diggings many military men and 
University graduates, who generally retain their polish of 
manner, though outwardly they are often the roughest of 
the rough. Some of them tell strange stories. One Cam- 
bridge man, who was acting as a Post-office clerk (not at Ho- 
kitika), told me that in 1862, shortly after taking his degree, 
he went out to British Columbia to settle upon land. He 
soon spent his capital at billiards in Victoria City, and went 
as a digger to the Frazer River. There he made a " pile," 
which he gambled away on his road back, and he struggled 
through the winter of 1863-4 by shooting and selling gam^. 
In 1864 he was attached as a hunter to the Vancouver's Ex- 
ploring Expedition, and in 1865 started with a small sum of 
money for Australia. He was wrecked, lost all he had, and 
was forced to work his passage down to Melbourne. From 
there he went into South Australia as the driver of a reaping- 
machine, and was finally, through the efforts of his friends in 
England, appointed to a Post-office clerkship in 'New Zealand, 
which colony he intended to quit for California or Chili. 
This was not the only man of education whom I myself found 
upon the diggings, as I met with a Christchurch man, who, 
however, had left Oxford without a degree, actually working 
as a digger in a surface mine. 



HOKITIKA. 241 

In the outskirts of Hokitika I came upon a palpable Life- 
guardsman, cooking for a roadside station, with his smock 
worn like a soldier's tunic, and his cap stuck on one ear in 
Windsor fashion. A "squatter" from near Christchurch, 
who was at the BuUer selling sheep, told me that he had an 
ex-captain in the Guards at work for weekly wages on his 
" shee|)-run," and that a neighbor had a lieutenant of Lancers 
rail-splitting at his " station." 

ISTeither the habits nor the morals of this strange commu- 
nity are of the best. You never see a drunken man, but drink- 
ing is apparently the chief occupation of that portion of the 
town population which is not actually employed in digging. 
The mail-coaches which run across the island on the great new 
road, and along the sands to the other mining settlements, 
have singularly short stages, made so, it would seem, for the 
benefit of the keepers of the " saloons," for at every halt one 
or other of the passengers is expected to " shout," or " stand," 
as it would be called at home, " drinks all round." " What'll 
yer shbut ?" is the only question ; and want of coined money 
need be no hinderance, for "gold-dust is taken at the bar." 
One of the favorite amusements of the diggers at Pakihi, on 
the days when the store-schooner arrives from Nelson, is to fill 
a bucket with champagne and drink till they feel " comforta- 
ble."' This done, they seat themselves in the road, with their 
feet on the window-sill of the shanty, and, calling to the first 
passer, ask him to drink from the bucket. If he consents — 
good ; if not, up they jump, and duck his head in the wine, 
which remains for the next comer. 

When I left Hokitika, it was by the new road, 170 miles in 
length, which crosses the Alps and the island, and connects 
Christchurch, the capital of Canterbury, with the western 
parts of the province. The bush between the sea and mount- 
ains is extremely lovely. The highway is "corduroyed" 
with trunks of the tree-fern, and in the swamps the sleepers 
have commenced to grow at each end, so that a close-set double 
row of young tree-ferns is rising along portions of the road. 
The bush is densely matted with an undergrowth of supple- 
jack and all kinds of creepers, but here and there one finds a 
grove of tree-ferns twenty feet in height, and grown so thickly 
as to prevent the existence of underwood and ground-plants. 

L 



24:2 Gkeater Britain. 

The peculiarity which makes the New Zealand west-coast 
scenery the most beautiful in the world to those who like more 
green than California has to show, is that here alone can you 
tind semi-tropical vegetation growing close up to the eternal 
snows. The latitude and the great moisture of the climate 
bring the long glaciers very low into the valleys ; and the ab- 
sence of all true whiter, coupled with the rain-fall, causes the 
growth of palm-like ferns upon the ice-river's very edge. The 
glaciers of Mount Cook are the longest in the world, except 
those at the sources of the Indus, but close ^bout them have 
been found tree-ferns of thirty and forty feet in height. It is 
not till you ent^ the mountains that you escape the moisture 
of the coast, and quit for the scenery of the Alps the scenery 
of fairy-land. 

Bumj^ing and tumbling in the mail-cart through the rushing 
blue-gray waters of the Taramakao, I found myself within the 
mountains of the Snowy range. In the Otira Gorge, also 
known as Arthur's Pass — ^from Arthur Dobson, brother to the 
surveyor murdered by the Thugs — six small glaciers 'v\'tere in 
sight at once. The Rocky Mountains opposite to Denver are 
loftier, and not less snowy than the New Zealand Alps, but in 
the Rockies there are no glaciers south of about 50° N. ; while 
in New Zealand — a winterless country — they are common at 
eight degrees nearer to the line. The varying amount of 
moisture has doubtless caused this difference. 

As we journeyed through the pass, there was one grand 
view — and only one : the glimpse of the ravine to the eastward 
of Mount RoUestone, caught from the desert shore of Lake 
Misery — a tarn near the " divide " of waters. About its banks 
there grows a plant, unknown, they say, except at this lonely 
spot — the RockAvood lily — a bushy plant, with a round, polish- 
ed, concave leaf, and a cup-shaped flower of virgin white that 
seems to take its tint from the encircling snows. 

In the evening we had a view that for gloomy grandeur 
can not well be matched — that from near Bealey township, 
where we struck the Waimakiriri Valley. The river-bed is 
half a mile in width, the stream itself not more than ten yards 
across, but, like all New Zealand rivers, subject to freshets, 
which fill its bed to a great dejDth with a surging, foaming 
flood. Some of the victims of the Waimakiriri are buried 



HOKITIKA. 243 

alongside the road. Dark evergreen bush shuts in the river- 
bed, and is topped on the one side by dreary frozen peaks, and 
on the other by still gloomier mountains of bare rock. 

Our road next morning from the Cass, where we had spent 
the night, lay through the eastern foot-hills and down to Can- 
terbury Plains by way of Porter's Pass — a narrow track on 
the top of a tremendous precipice, but soon to be changed for 
a road cut along its face. The plains are one great sheep-run; 
open, almost flat, and upon which you lose aU sense of size. 
At the mountain-foot they are covered with tall, coarse, native 
grass, and are dry, like the Kansas prairie ; about Christchurch, 
the English clover and English grasses have usurped the soil, 
and all is fresh and green. 

"New Zealand is at present divided into nine semi-independ- 
ent provinces, of which three are large and powerful, and the 
remainder comparatively small and poor. Six of the nine are 
true States, having each its history as an independent settle- 
ment ; the remaining three are creations of the Federal Gov- 
ernment or of the Crown. 

These are not the only difficulties in the way of N'ew Zea- 
land statesmen, for the provinces themselves are far from be- 
ing homogeneous units. Two of the wealthiest of all the 
States, which were settled as colonies with a religious tinge — 
Otago, Presbyterian ; and Canterbury, Episcopalian — have 
been blessed or cursed with the presence of a vast horde of 
diggers, of no particular religion, and free from any reverence 
for things established. Canterbury province is not only polit- 
ically divided against itself, but geographically split in twain 
by the Snow range, and the diggers hold the west-coast bush, 
the old settlers the east-coast plain. East and west, each cries 
out that the other side is robbing it. The Christchurch people 
say that their money is being spent on Westland, and the 
Westland diggers cry out against the foppery and aristocratic 
pretense of Christchurch. A division of the province seems 
inevitable, unless, indeed, the " Centralists " gain the day, and 
bring about either a closer union of the whole of the provinces, 
coupled with a grant of local self-government to their subdi- 
visions, or else the entire destruction of the provincial system. 

The division into provinces was at one time necessary, from 
the fact that the settlements were historically distinct, and 



244 Greater Britain. 

physically cut off from each other by the impenetrability of 
the bush and the absence of all roads ; but the barriers are now 
surmounted, and no sufficient reason can be found for keeping 
up ten Cabinets and ten Legislatures for a population of only 
200,000 souls. Such iis the costliness of the provincial system 
and of Maori wars, that the taxation of the New Zealanders is 
nine times as heavy as that of their brother-colonists in Can- 
ada. 

It is not probable that so costly and so inefficient a system 
of government as that which now obtains in New Zealand can 
long continue to exist. It is not only dear and bad, but dan- 
gerous in addition ; and during my visit to Port Chalmers, the 
province of Otago was loudly threatening secession. Like all 
other federal constitutions, that of New Zealand fails to pro- 
vide a sufficiently strong central power to meet a divergence 
of interests between the several States. The system which 
failed in Greece, which failed in Germany, which failed in 
America, has failed here in the antipodes ; and it may be said 
that, in these days of improved communications, wherever fed- 
eration is possible, a still closer union is at least as likely to 
prove lasting. 

New Zealand suffers, not only by the artificial division into 
provinces, but also by the physical division of the country into 
two great islands, too far apar.t to be ever thoroughly homo- 
geneous, too near together to be wholly independent of each 
other. The difficulty has been hitherto increased by the ex- 
istence in the North Island of a powerful and warlike native 
race all but extinct in the South Island. Not only have the 
Southern people no native wars, but they have no native claim- 
ants from whom every acre for the settler must be bought, 
and they naturally decline to submit to ruinous taxation to 
purchase Parewanui from, or to defend Taranaki against, the 
Maories. Having been thwarted by the Home Government in 
the agitation for the " separation " of the islands, the Southern 
people now aim at " ultra-provincialism," declaring for a sys- 
tem under which the provinces would virtually be independ- 
ent colonies, connected only by a confederation of the loosest 
kind. 

The jealousies of the great towns, here as in Italy, have 
much bearing upon the political situation. Auckland is for 



HOKITIKA. 245 

separation, because in that event it would of necessity become 
the seat of the government of the North Island. In the 
South, Christchurch and Dunedin have similar claims ; and 
each of them, ignoring the other, begs for separation in the 
hope of becoming the Southern caj)ital. Wellington and 
Nelson alone are f oe, the continuance of the federation — Wel- 
lington because it is already the capital, and Nelson because 
it is intriguing to supplant its neighbor. Although the diffi- 
culties of the moment mainly arise out of the war expenditure, 
and will terminate with the extinction of the Maori race, her 
geographical shape almost forbids us to hope that New Zea- 
land will ever form a single country under a strong central 
government. 

To obtain an adequate idea of the difficulty of his task, a 
new governor, on landing in New Zealand, could not do bet- 
ter than cross the Southern Island. On the west side of the 
mountains he would find a restless digger-democracy, likely 
to be succeeded in the future by small manufacturers, and 
spade-farmers growing root-crops upon small holdings of fer- 
tile loam ; on the east, gentlemen sheep-farmers, holding their 
twenty thousand acres each — supporters by their position of 
the existing state of things, or of an aristocratic republic, iA 
which men of their own caste would rule. 

Christchurch — Ej^iscopalian, dignified — the first settlement 
in the province, and still the capital, affects to despise Hoki- 
tika, already more wealthy and more populous. Christchurch 
imports English rooks to caw in the elm-trees of her cathedral 
close; Hokitika imports men. Christchurch has not fallen 
away fi'om her traditions : every street is named from an En- 
glish bishopric, and the society is that of an English country 
town. 

Returning northward along the coast, in the shade of the 
cold and gloomy mountains of the Kaikoura range, I found at 
Wellington two invitations awaiting me to be present at great 
gatherings of the native tribes. 

The next day I started for the Manawatu River and Pare- 
wanui Pah. 



246 Gbeater Britain. 



CHAPTER III. 

PO L YKE S I ANS. 

The name " Maori " is said to mean " native," but the 
boast on the part of the Maori race contained in the title 
" Natives of the Soil " is one which conflicts with their tra- 
ditions. These make them out to be mere interlopers — Ta- 
hitians, they themselves say — who, within historic ages, sail- 
ed down, island by island, in their war-canoes, massacring the 
inhabitants, and, finally landing in New Zealand, found a nu- 
merous horde of blacks of the Australian race living in the 
forests of the South Island. Favored by a year of exception- 
al drought, they set fire to the forests, and burned to the last 
man, or drove into the sea, the aboriginal possessors of the 
soil. Some ethnologists believe that this account is in the 
main correct, but hold that the Maori race is Malaj'-, and not 
originally Tahitian : others have tried to show that the con- 
flict between blacks and browns was not confined to these two 
islands, but raged throughout the whole of Polynesia ; and 
that it was terminated in New Zealand itself, not by the de- 
struction of the blacks, but by the amalgamation of the op- 
posing races. 

The legends allege war as the cause for the flight to New 
Zealand. The accounts of some of the migrations are cir- 
cumstantial in the extreme, and describe the first planting of 
the yams, the astonishment of the people at the new flowers 
and trees of the islands, and many such details of the landing. 
The names of the chiefs and of the canoes are given in a sort 
of " catalogue of ships," and the wars of the settlers are nar- 
rated at length, with the heroic exaggeration common to the 
legends of all lands. 

The canoe-fleet reached New Zealand in the fifteenth cen- 
tury, it is believed, and the people landed, chanting a chorus- 
speech, which is still preserved : 

"We come at last to this fair land — a resting-place; 
Spirit of the Earth, to thee, we, coming from afar, present our hearts for 
food." 



Polynesians. 247 

That the Maories are Polynesians there can be no doubt : a 
bird with them is " manu," a fish, " ika" (the Greek 'iOxvQi be- 
come with the digamma " piscis " and " poisson ;" and con- 
nected with " fisch " and " fish "), as they are throughout the 
Malayan Archipelago and Polynesian Isles : the Maori " atua," 
a god, is the " hotua " of the Friendly Islanders ; the " wah- 
res," or native huts, are identical in all the islands ; the names 
of the chief deities are the same throughout Polynesia, and 
the practice of tattooing, the custom of carving grotesque ■ 
squatting figures on tombs, canoes, and " pahs," and that of 
tabooing things, places, times, and persons, prevail from Ha- 
waii to Stewart's Land, though not everywhere so strictly 
read as in the Tonga Isles, where the very ducks are muzzled 
to keep them from disturbing by their quacking* the sacred 
stillness of "tapti time." 

Polynesian traditions mostly point to the Malay peninsula 
as the cradle of the race, and the personal resemblance of the 
Maories to the Malays is very strong except in the setting of 
the eyes ; while the figures on the gate-posts of the I^ew 
Zealand pahs have eyes more oblique than are now found 
among the Maori people. Strangely enough, the 'New Zea- 
land " pah " is identical with the Burmese " stockade," but the 
word " pah " stands both for the palisade and for the village 
of wahres which it contains. The Polynesian and Malay 
tongues have not much in common ; but that variations of 
language sufficiently great to leave no apparent tie spring up 
in a few centuries, can not be denied by us who know for 
certain that " visible " and " optician " come from a common 
root, and can trace the steps through which " jour " is derived 
from "dies." 

The tradition of the Polynesians is that they came from 
Paradise, which they place, in the Southern islands, to the 
north ; in the Northern islands, to the westward. This le- 
gend indicates a migration from Asia to the Northern isl- 
ands, and thence southward to New Zealand, and accounts 
for the non - colonization^ of Austraha by the Polynesians. 
The sea between New Zealand and Australia is too rough 
and wide to be traversed by canops, and the wind -chart 
shows that the track of the Malays must have been eastward 
along the equatorial belt of calms, and then back to the 



248 Greater Britain. 

south-west, with the south-east trade-wind right abeam to their 
canoes. 

The wanderings of the Polynesian race were probably not 
confined to the Pacific. Ethnology is as yet in its infancy: 
we know nothing of the Tudas of the Neilgherries ; we ask in 
vain who are the Gonds; we are in doubt about the Japanese; 
we are lost in perplexity as to who we may be ourselves ; but 
there is at least as much ground for the statement that the 
Ped Indians are Malays as for the assertion that we are Sax- 
ons. 

The resemblances between the Ped Indians and the Pacific 
Islanders are innumerable. Strachey's account of the Indians 
of Virginia, written in 1612, needs but a change in the names 
to fit the Maories : Powhatan's house is that of William 
Thompson. Cannibalism prevailed in Brazil and along the 
Pacific coast of North America at the time of their discovery, 
and even the Indians of Chili ate many an early navigator; 
the aborigines of Vancouver's Island are tattooed ; their ca- 
noes resemble those of the Malay's, and the mode of paddling 
is the same from 'New Zealand to Hudson's Bay, from Florida 
to Singapore. Jade ornaments of the shape of the Maori 
" Heitiki " (the charm worn about the neck) have been found 
by the French in Guadaloupe ; the giant masonry of Central 
America is identical with that of Cambodia and Siam. Small- 
legged squatting figures, like those of the idols of China and 
Japan, not only surmount the gate-posts of the "New Zealand 
pahs, but are found eastward to Honduras, westward to Bur- 
mah, to Tartary, and to Ceylon. The fibre mats, common to 
the Polynesians and Ped Indians, are unknown to savages 
elsewhere, and the feather head-dresses of the Maories are 
almost identical with those of the Delawares or Hurons. 

In the Indians of America and of Polynesia there is the 
same hatred of continued toil, and the same readiness to en- 
gage in violent exertion for a time. Superstition and witch- 
craft are common to all untaught peoples, but in the Malays 
and red men they take similar shapes ; and the Indians of 
Mexico and Peru had, like all the Polynesians, a sacred lan- 
guage, understood only ty the priests. The American altars 
were one with the tem|5les of the Pacific, and were not con- 
fined to Mexico, for they form the " mounds " of Ohio and 



Polynesians. 249 

Illinois. There is great likeness between the legend of Maui, 
the Maori hero, and that of Hiawatha, especially in the his- 
tory of how the sun was noosed, and made to move more 
slowly through the skies, so as to give men long days for toil. 
The resemblance of the Maori " runanga," or assembly for 
debate, to the Indian council, is extremely close, and through- 
out America and Polynesia a singular blending of poetry and 
ferocity is characteristic of the Malays. 

In color, the Indians and Polynesians are not alike ; but 
color does not seem to be, ethnologically speaking, of much 
account. The Hindoos of Calcutta have the same features as 
those of Delhi ; but the former are black, the latter brown, 
or, if high-caste men, almost w^hite. Exposure to sun in a 
damp, hot climate seems to blacken every race that it does 
not destroy. The races that it will finally destroy, tropical 
heat first whitens. The English planters of Mississippi and 
Florida are extremely dark, yet there is not a suspicion, of 
black blood in their veins : it is the white blood of the slaves 
to which the Abolitionists refer in their philippics. The 
Jews at Bombay and Aden are of a deep brown ; in Morocco 
they are swarthy ; in England, nearly white. 

Religious rites and social customs outlast both physical 
type and language ; but even were it otherwise, there is great 
resemblance even in build and feature between the Polyne- 
sians and many of the " Red Indian " tribes. The aboriginal 
people of New York State are described by the early navi- 
gators not as tall, grave, hooked-nose men, but as copper-col- 
ored, pleasant-looking, and with quick, shrewd eyes ; and the 
Mexican Indian bears more likeness to the Sandwich Islander 
than to the Delaware or Cherokee. 

In reaching South America, there were no distances to be 
overcome such as to present insurmountable difficulties to the 
Malays. Their canoes have frequently, within the years that 
we have had our missionary stations in the islands, made in- 
voluntary voyages of six or seven hundred miles. A Western 
editor has said of Columbus that he deserves no praise for 
discovering America, as it is so large that he could not well 
have missed it ; but Easter Island is so small that the chances 
must have been thousands to one against its being reached 
by canoes sailing even from the nearest land 5 yet it is an as- 

L 2 



250 Greater Britain. 

certained fact that Easter Island was peopled by the Polyne- 
sians. Whatever drove canoes to Easter Island would have 
driven them from the island to Chili and Peru. The Poly- 
nesian Malays would sometimes be taken out to sea by sud- 
den storms, by war, by hunger, by love of change. In war- 
time, whole tribes have, within historic days, been clapped 
into their boats, and sent to sea by a merciful conqueror who 
had dined : this occurs, however, only when the market is al- 
ready surfeited with human joints. 

In sailing from America to New Zealand, we met strong 
westerly winds before we had gone half-way across the seas, 
and, south of the trade- wind region, these blow constantly to 
within a short distance of the American coast, where they are 
lost upon the edge of the Chilian current. A canoe blown 
off from the Southern islands, and running steadily before thd 
wind, would be cast on the Peruvian coast near Quito. 

"When Columbus landed in the Atlantic islands he was, 
perhaps, not mistaken in his belief that it was " The Indies " 
that he had found — an India peopled by the Malay race, till 
lately the most widely-scattered of all the nations of the 
world, but one which the English seem destined to supplant. 

The Maories, without doubt, were originally Malays, emi- 
grants from the winterless climate of the Malay Peninsula and 
Polynesian Archipelago ; and, although the northernmost por- 
tions of New Zealand suited them not ill, the cold winters of 
the South Island prevented the spread of the bands they 
planted there. At all times it has been remarked by ethnolo- 
gists and acclimatizers that it is easier by far to carry men 
and beasts from the poles toward the tropics than from the 
tropics to the colder regions. The Malays, in coming to 
New Zealand, unknowingly broke one of Nature's laws, and 
their descendants are paying the penalty in extinction. 



Paeewanui Pah. 251 



CHAPTER lY. 

PAEEWANUI PAH. 

" Here is Petatone. 
This is the 10th of December ; 
The sun shines, and the birds sing ; 
Clear is the water in rivers and streams ; 
Bright is the sky, and the sun is high in the air. 
This is the 10th of December ; 
But where is the money ? 

Three years has this matter in many debates been discussed, 
And here at last is Petatone ; 
But where is the money ?" 

A BAND of Maori women, slowly chanting in a high, strain- 
ed key, stood at the gate of a pah, and met with this song a 
few Englishmen who were driving rapidly on to their land. 

Our track lay through a swamp of the ISTew Zealand flax. 
Hugh sword-like leaves and giant flower-stalks aU but hid 
from view the Maori stockades. To the left was a village of 
low wahres, fenced round with a double row of lofty posts, 
carved with rude images of gods and men, and having post- 
erns here and there. On the right were groves of karakas, 
children of Tanemahuta, the N'ew Zealand sacred trees — un- 
der their shade, on a hill, a camp and another and larger pah. 
In startling contrast to the dense masses of the oily leaves, 
there stretched a great extent of light-green sward, where 
there were other camps, and a tall flag-staff, from which float- 
ed the white flag and the union-jack, emblems of British sov- 
ereignty and peace. 

A thousand kilted Maories dotted the green landscape with 
patches of brilliant tartans and scarlet cloth. Women lounged 
about, whiling away the time with dance and song ; and from 
all the corners of the glade the soft cadence of the Maori cry 
of welcome came floating to us on the breeze, sweet as the 
sound of distant bells. 

As we drove quickly on, we found ourselves in the midst 



252. Greater Britain. 

of a thronging crowd of square-built men, brown in color, and 
for the most part not much darker than Spaniards, but with 
here and there a woolly negro in their ranks. Glancing at 
them as we were hurried past, we saw that the men were ro- 
bust, well-limbed, and tall. They greeted us pleasantly with 
many a cheerful, open smile, but the faces of the older people 
were horribly tattooed in spiral curves. The chiefs carried 
battle-clubs of jade and bone, the women wore strange orna- 
ments. At the flag-staff we pulled up, and, while the prelim- 
inaries of the council were arranged, had time to discuss with 
Maori and with " Pakeha " (white man) the questions that 
had brought us thither. 

The purchase of an enormous block of land — that of the 
Manawatu — had long been an object wished for and worked 
for by the Provincial Government of Wellington. The com- 
pletion of the sale it was that had brought the superintendent, 
Dr. Featherston, and humbler Pakehas to Parewanui Pah. It 
was not only that the land was wanted by w^ay of room for 
the flood of settlers, but purchase by Government was, more- 
over, the only means whereby war between the various native 
claimants of the land could be prevented. The Pakeha and 
Maori had agreed upon a price ; the question that remained 
for settlement was how the money should be shared. One 
tribe had owned the land from the earliest times ; another had 
conquered some miles of it ; a third had had one of its chiefs 
cooked and eaten upon the ground. In the eye of the Maori 
law, the last of these titles was the best : the blood of a chief 
overrides all mere historic claims. The two strongest human 
motives concurred to make war probable, for avarice and jeal- 
ousy alike prevented agreement as to the division of the spoil. 

Each of the three tribes claiming had half a dozen allied 
and related nations upon the ground ; every man was there 
who had a claim, direct or indirect, or thought he had, to any 
portion of the block. Individual ownership and tribal owner- 
ship conflicted. The ISTgatiapa were well-armed; the Ngati- 
raukawa had their rifles ; the Wanganuis had sent for theirs. 
The greatest tact on the part of Dr. Featherston was needed 
to prevent a fight such as would have roused l^ew Zealand 
from Auckland to Port Nicholson. 

On a signal from the superintendent, the heralds went 



Parewanui Pah. 253 

round the camps and pahs to call the tribes to council. The 
summons was a long-drawn minor-descending scale : a plaint- 
ive cadence, which at a distance blends into a bell-like chord. 
The words mean, " Come hither ! Come hither ! Come ! 
come ! Maories ! Come !" and men, women, and chil- 
dren soon came thronging in from every side, the chiefs bear- 
ing sceptres and spears of ceremony, and their women wear- 
ing round their necks the symbol of nobility, the Heitiki, or 
greenstone god. These images, we are told, have pedigrees, 
and names like those of men. 

We, with the resident magistrate of Wanganui, seated our- 
selves beneath the flag-staff. A chief, meeting the people as 
they came up, stayed them with the gesture that Homer as- 
cribes to Hector, and bade them sit in a huge circle round the 
spar. 

No sooner were we seated on our mat than there ran slow- 
ly into the centre of the ring a plumed and kilted chief, with 
sparkling eyes, the perfection of a savage. Halting sudden- 
ly, he raised himself upon his toes, frowned, and stood bran- 
dishing his short, feathered spear. It was Hunia te Hakeke, 
the young chief of the Ngatiapa. 

Throwing off his plaid, he commenced to speak, springing 
hither and thither with leoj)ard-like freedom of gait, and some- 
times leaping high into the air to emphasize a word. Fierce 
as were the gestures, his speech was conciliatory, and the 
Maori flowed from his lips — a soft Tuscan tongue. As, with 
a movement full of vigorous grace, he sprang back to the 
ranks to take his seat, there ran round the ring a hum and 
buzz of popular applause. 

" Governor " Hunia was followed by a young Wanganui 
chief who wore hunting-breeches and high boots, and a long 
black mantle over his European clothes. There was some- 
thing odd in the shape of the cloak ; and when we came to 
look closely at it, w^e found that it was the skirt of the riding- 
habit of his half-caste wife. The great chiefs paid so little 
heed to this flippant fellow, as to stand up and harangue their 
tribes in the middle of his speech, which came thus to an un- 
timely end. 

A funny old gray-beard, Waitere Maru Maru, next rose, 
and, smothering down the jocularity of his face, turned to- 



254 Greatek Britain. 

ward us for a moment the typical head of Peter, as you see it 
on the windows of every modern church — ^for a moment only, 
for, as he raised his hand to wave his tribal sceptre, his apos- 
tolic drapery began to slip from off his shoulders, and he had 
to clutch at it with the energy of a topman taking in a reef 
in a whole gale. His speech was full of Nestorian proverbs 
and wise saws, but he wandered of£ into a history of the 
Wanganui lands, by which he soon became as wearied as we 
ourselves were ; for he stopped short, and with a twinkle of 
the eye, said, " Ah ! Waitere is no longer young : he is climb- 
ing the snow-clad mountain Ruahine ; he is becoming an old 
man ;" and down he sat. 

Karanama, a small Ngatiraukawa chief with a white mus- 
tache, who looked like an old French concierge, followed 
Maru Maru, and, with much use of his sceptre, related a 
dream foretelling the happy issue of the negotiations ; for the 
little man was one of those "dreamers of dreams" against 
whom Moses warned the Israelites. 

Karanama's was not the only trance and vision of which 
we heard in the course of these debates. The Maories be- 
lieve that in their dreams the seers hear great bands of spirits 
singing chants : these, when they wake, the prophets reveal to 
all the people ; but it is remarked that the vision is generally 
to the advantaofe of the seer's tribe. 

Karanama's speech was answered by the head chief of the 
Rangitane Maories, Te Peeti Te Awe Awe, who, throwing off 
his uj)per clothing as he warmed to his subject, and strutting 
pompously round and rojmd the ring, challenged Karanama 
to immediate battle, or his tribe to general encounter ; but he 
cooled down as he went on, and in his last sentence showed 
us that Maori oratory, however ornate usually, can be made 
extremely terse. " It is hot," he said — " it is hot, and the 
very birds are loth to sing. We have talked for a week, and 
are therefore dry. Let us take our share — £10,000, or what- 
ever we can get, and then we shall be dry no more." 

The Maori custom of walking about, dancing, leaping, un- 
dressing, running, and brandishing spears during the delivery 
of a speech, is convenient for all parties : to the speaker, be- 
cause it gives him time to think of what he shall say next ; to 
the listener, because it allows him to weigh the speaker's 



Pare WAN ui Pah. 255 

words ; to the European hearer, because it permits the inter- 
preter to keep pace with the orator without an effort. On 
this occasion, the resident magistrate of Wanganui, Mr. Bul- 
ler, a Maori scholar of eminence, and the attached friend of 
some of the chiefs, interpreted for Dr. Featherston ; and we 
were allowed to lean over him in such a way as to hear every 
word that passed. That the able Superintendent of Welling- 
ton — the great protector of the Maories, the man to whom 
they look as to Queen Victoria's second in command, should 
be wholly dependent upon interpreters, however skilled, seems 
almost too singular to be believed ; but it is possible that Dr. 
Featherston may find in pretended want of knowledge much 
advantage to the Government. He is able to collect his 
thoughts before he replies to a difficult question ; he can allow 
an epithet to escape his notice in the filter of translation ; he 
can listen and speak with greater dignity. 

The day was wearing on before Te Peeti's speech was 
done, and, as the Maories say, our waistbands began to slip 
down low ; so all now went to lunch, both Maori and Pakeha, 
they sitting in circles, each with his bowl, or flax-blade dish, 
and wooden spoon, we having a table and a chair or two in 
the Mission-house ; but we were so tempted by Hori Kingi's 
white-bait that we begged some of him as we passed. The 
Maories boil the little fish in milk, and flavor them with leeks. 
Great fish, meat, vegetables, almost all they eat, in short, save 
white-bait, is " steamed " in the under-ground native oven. 
A hole is dug, and filled with wood, and stones are piled upon 
the wood, a small opening being left for draught. While the 
wood is burning, the stones become red-hot, and fall through 
into the hole. They are then covered with damp fern, or else 
with wet mats of flax plaited at the moment ; the meat is put 
in, and covered with more mats ; the whole is sprinkled with 
water, and then earth is heaped on till the vapor ceases to es- 
cape. The joint takes about an hour, and is delicious. Fish 
is wrapped in a kind of dock-leaf, and so steamed. 

While the men's eating was thus going on, many of the 
women stood idly round, and we were enabled to judge of 
Maori beauty. A profusion of long, crisp curls, a short black 
pipe thrust between stained lips, a pair of black eyes gleam- 
ing from a tattooed face, denote the Maori belle^ who wears 



256 Greater Britain. 

for her only robe a long bed-gown of dirty calico, but whose 
ears and neck are tricked out with greenstone ornaments, the 
signs of birth and wealth. Here and there you find a girl 
with long, smooth tresses, and almond - shaped black eyes : 
these charms often go along with prominent, thin features, 
and suggest at once the Jewess and the gipsy girl. The 
women smoke continually, the men not much. 

When at four o'clock we returned to the flag-staff, we 
found that the temperature, which during the morning had 
been too hot, had become that of a fine English June — the air 
light, the trees and grass lit by a gleaming yellow sunshine 
that reminded me of the Californian haze. 

Durinor luncheon we had heard that Dr. Featherston's 
proposals as to the division of the purchase-money had been 
accepted by the Ngatiapa, but not by Hunia himself, whose 
vanity would brook no scheme not of his own conception. 
We were no sooner returned to the ring than he burst.in upon 
us with a defiant speech. " Unjust," he declared, " as was 
the proposition of great ' Petatone ' (Feathers ton), he would 
have accepted it for the sake of peace had he been allowed to 
divide the tribal share ; but as the Wanganuis insisted on 
having a third of his £15,000, and as Petatone seemed to 
support them in their claim, he should have nothing more to 
do with the sale." " The Wanganuis claim as our relatives," 
he said ; " verily, the pumpkin-shoots spread far." 

Karanama, the seer, stood up to answer Hunia, and began 
his speech in a tone of ridicule. " Hunia is like the ti-tree ; 
if you cut him down, he sprouts again." Hunia sat quietly 
through a good deal of this kind of wit, till at last some epi- 
thet provoked him to interrupt the speaker. " What a fine 
fellow you are, Karanama ; you'll tell us soon that you've 
two pair of legs !" " Sit down !" shrieked Karanama, and a 
word- war ensued, but the abuse was too full of native raciness 
and vigor to be fit for English ears. The chiefs kept danc- 
ing round the ring, threatening each other with their spears. 
" Why do not you hurl at me, Karanama ?" said Hunia ; " it 
is easier to parry spears than lies." At last Hunia sat down. 

Karanama, feinting and making at him with his spear, re- 
proached Hunia with a serious flaw in his pedigree — a blot 
which is said to account for Hunia's hatred to the Ngatirau- 



Fakewanui Pah. 257 

kawa, to whom his mother was for years a slave. Hunia, 
without rising from the ground, shrieked " liar !" Karanama 
again spoke the obnoxious word. Springing from the ground, 
Hunia snatched his spear from where it stood, and ran at his 
enemy as though to strike him. Karanama stood stock-still. 
Coming up to him at a charge, Hunia suddenly stopped, 
raised himself on tiptoe, shaking his spear, and flung out 
som^ contemptuous epithet ; then turned, and stalked slowly, 
with a springing gait, back to his own corner of the ring. 
There he stood, haranguing his people in a bitter under-tone, 
Karanama did the like with his. The interpreters could not 
keep pace with what was said. We understood that the 
chiefs were calling each upon his tribe to support him, if 
need were, in war. After a few minutes of this pause, they 
wheeled round, as though by a common impulse, and again 
began to pour out torrents of abuse. The applause became 
frequent, hums quickened into shouts, cheer followed cheer, 
till at last the ring was alive with men and women springing 
from the ground, and crying out on the opposing leader for a 
dastards • 

We had previously been told to have no fear that resort 
would be had to blows. The Maories never fight upon a sud- 
den quarrel : war is with them a solemn act, entered upon 
only after much deliberation. Those of us who were stran- 
gers to New Zealand were nevertheless not without our 
doubts, while for half an hour we lay upon the grass watching 
the armed champions running round the ring, challenging 
each other to mortal combat on the spot. 

The chieftains at last became exhausted, and the Mission- 
bell beginning to toll for evening chapel, Hunia broke off in 
the middle of his abuse, " Ah ! I hear the bell I" and, turning, 
stalked out of the ring toward his pah, leaving it to be infer- 
red, by those who did not know him, that he was going to 
attend the service. The meeting broke up in confusion, and 
the Upper Wanganui tribes at once began their march to- 
ward the mountains, leaving behind them only a delegation 
of their chiefs. 

As we drove down to the coast, we talked over the close 
resemblance of the Maori runanga to the Homeric council ; it 
had struck us all. Here, as in the Greek camp, we had the 



258 Geeater Britain. 

ring of people, into which advanced the lance-bearing or scep- 
tre-wearing chiefs, they alone speaking, and the people back- 
ing them only by a hum ; " The block of wood dictates not 
to the carver, neither the people to their chiefs," is a Maori 
proverb. The boasting of ancestry, and bragging of deeds 
and military exploits, to which modern wind-bags would only 
casually allude, was also thoroughly Homeric. In Hunia we 
had our Achilles ; the retreat of Hunia to his wahre was that 
of Achilles to his tent ; the cause of quarrel alone was differ- 
ent, though in both cases it arose out of the division of spoil 
— ^in the one case the result of lucky wars, in the other of the 
Pakeha's weakness. The Argive and Maori leaders are one in 
fire, figure, port, and mien ; alike, too, even in their sulkiness. 
In Waitere and Aperahama Tipai we had two Nestors ; our 
Thersites was Porea, the jester, a half -mad buffoon, continu- 
ally mimicking the chiefs or interrupting them, and being by 
them or their messensrers as often kicked and cuffed. In the 
frequency of repetition, the use of proverbs ana of simile, the 
Maories resemble not Homer's Greeks so much as Homer's 
self; but the calling together of the' people by the heralds, the 
secret conclave of the chiefs, the feast, the conduct of the as- 
sembly — all were the exact repetition of the events recorded 
in the first and second books of the " Iliad " as having hap- 
pened on the Trojan plains. The single point of difierence 
was not in favor of the Greeks ; the Maori women took their 
place in council with the men. 

As we drove home, a storm came on, and hung about the 
coast so long that it was not till near eleven at night that we 
were able to take our swim in the heated waterg of the Mana- 
watu River, and frighten oE every duck and heron in the dis- 
trict. 

In the morning we rose to alarming news. Upon, the pre- 
text of the presence in the neighborhood of the* Hau-hau 
chief Wi Hapi with a war-party of 200 men, the* unarmed 
Parewanui natives had sent to "Wanganui for their guns, and 
it was only by a conciliatory speech at the midnight runanga 
that Mr. BuUer had succeeded in preventing a complete break- 
up of all the camps, if not an intertribal war. There seemed 
to be white men behind the scenes who were not friendly to 
the sale, and the debate had lasted from dark till dawn. 



Parewanui Pah. 259 

While we were at breakfast, a ISTgatiapa officer of the na- 
tive contingent brought down a letter to Dr. Featherston from 
Hunia and Hori Kingi, the tribal chiefs, calling us to a gen- 
eral meeting of the tribes convened for noon, to be held in 
the Ngatiapa Pah. The letter was addressed, " Kia te Peta- 
tone te Huj)erintene " — " To the Featherston, the Superintend- 
ent " — the alterations in the chief words being made to bring 
them within the grasp of Maori tongues, which can not sound 
?;'s, ^A's, nor sibilants of any kind. The absence of harsh 
sounds, and the rule which makes every word end with a 
vowel, give a peculiar softness and charm to the Maori lan- 
guage. Sugar becomes huka ; scissors, hikiri ; sheep, hipi ; 
and so with all English words adopted into Maori. The ren- 
derinef of the Hebrew names of the Old Testament is often 
singular: Genesis becomes Kenehi; Exodus is altered into 
Ekoruhe ; Leviticus is hardly recognizable in Rewitikuha ; 
Tiuteronomi reads strangely for Deuteronomy, and Hohua for 
Joshua; Jacob, Isaac, Moses, become Hakopa, Ihaka, and 
Mohi; Egypt is softened into Ihipa, Jordan into Horamo. 
The list of the nations^f Canaan seems to have been a stum- 
bling-block in the missionaries' way. The success obtained 
with Girgashites has not been great; it stands Kirekahi; 
Gaash is transmuted feito Kaaha, and Eleazar into EreOr. 
tara. ; 

When we drove on to the ground, all was at a dead-lock — 
the flag-staff bare, the chiefs sleeping in their wahres, and the 
common folk whiling away the hours with haka songs. Dr. 
Featherston retired from the ground, declaring that till the 
queen's flag was hoisted he would attend no debate, but he 
permitted us to wander in among the Maories. 

We were introduced to Tamiana te Rauparaha, chief of 
the ITgatitoa branch of the N^gatiraukawa, and son of the 
great cannibal chief of the same name who murdered Captain 
Wakefield. Old Rauparaha it was who hired an English 
ship to carry him and his nation to the South Island, where 
they ate several tribes, boiling the chiefs, by the captain's con- 
sent, in the ship's coppers, and salting down for future use the 
common people. When the captain, on return to port, claim- 
ed his price, Rauparaha told him to go about his business, or 
he should be salted too. The captain took the hint, but he 



260 Greater Britain. 

did not escape for long, as he was finally eaten by the Sand- 
wich Islanders in Hawaii. 

In answer to our request for a dance-song, Tamiana and 
Horomona Toremi replied through an interpreter that " the 
hands of the singers should beat time as fast as the pinions 
of the wild duck ;" and in a minute we were in the middle of 
an animated crowd of boys and women collected by Porea, 
the buffoon. 

As soon as the singers had squatted upon the grass, the 
jester began to run slowly up and down between their ranks 
as they sat swinging backward and forward in regular time, 
groaning in chorus, and looking upward with distorted faces. 

In a second dance, a girl standing out upon the grass 
chanted the air — a kind -of capstan-song — and then the " dan- 
cers," who were seated in one long row, joined in chorus, 
breathing violently in perfect time, half forming words, but 
not notes, swinging from side to side like the howling dervish- 
es, and using frightful gestures. This strange whisper-roar- 
ing went on increasing in rapidity and fierceness, till at last 
the singers worked themselves into ^ frenzy, in which they 
rolled their eyes, stiffened the arms and legs, clutched and 
clawed with the fingers, and snorted like maddened horses. 
Stripping off their clothes, they look^i more like the Maories 
of thirty years ago than those who see them only at the mis- 
sion-stations would believe. Other song-dances, in which the 
singers stood striking their heels at measured intervals upon 
the earth, were taken up with equal vigor by the boys and 
women, the grown men in their dignity keeping themselves 
aloof, although in his heart every Maori loves mimetic dance 
and song. We remarked that in the " kaka " the old women 
seemed more in earnest than the young, who were always 
bursting into laughter, and forgetting words and time. 

The savai^e love for semitones makes Maori music some- 

CD 

what wearisome to the English ear ; so after a time we began 
to walk through the pahs and sketch the Maories, to their 
great delight. I was drawing the grand old head of a ven- 
erable dame — Oriuhia te Aka — when she asked to see what I 
was about. As soon as I showed her the sketch she began to 
call me names, and from her gestures I saw that the insult 
was in the omission of the tattooing on her chin. When I 



Parewanui Pah. 261 

inserted the stri23es and curves, her delight was sucli that I 
greatly feared she would have embraced me. 

Strolling into the karaka groves, we came upon a Maori 
wooden tomb, of whicli the front was carved with figures 
three feet high, grotesque and obscene. Gigantic eyes, hands 
bearing clubs, limbs without bodies, and bodies without limbs, 
were figured here and there among more perfect carvings, 
and the whole was of a character which the Maories of to-day 
disown as they do cannibalism, wishing to have these horrid 
things forgotten. The sudden rise of the Hau-hau fanaticism 
within the last few years has shown us that the layer of civil- 
ization by which the old Maori habits are overlaid is thin in- 
deed. 

The flags remained down all day, and in the afternoon we 
returned to the coast to shoot duck and pukeko, a sort of 
moor-hen. It was not easy work, lor the birds fell in the flax- 
swamp, and the giant sword-like leaves of the JPhormlum, 
tenax cut our hands as we pushed our way througa its dense 
clumps and bushes, while some of the party suffered badly 
from the sun : Maui, the Maories say, must have chained him 
up too near the earth. After dark, we could see the glare of* 
the fires in the karaka groves, where the Maories were in coun- 
cil, and a Government surveyor came in to report that he had 
met the dissentient Wanganuis riding fast toward the hiUs. 

In the morning we were allowed to stay upon the coast till 
ten or eleven o'clock, when a messenger came down from Mr. 
Buller to call us to the pah : the council of the chiefs had 
again sat aU night — for the Maories act upon their proverb 
that the eyes of great chiefs should know no rest — and Hunia 
had carried every thing before him in the debate. 

As soon as the ring was formed, Hunia apologized for the 
pulling down of the queen's flag ; it had been done, he said, 
as a sign that the sale was broken off, not as an act of disre- 
spect. Having, in short, had things entirely his own way, he 
was disposed to be extremely friendly both to whites and 
Maories. The sale, he said, must be brought about, or the 
" world would be on fire with an intertribal war. "What is 
the good of the mountain-land ? There is nothing to eat but 
stones ; granite is a hard, but not a strengthening food, and 
women and land are the ruin of men." 



262 Gkeater Britain. 

After congratulatory speeches from other chiefs, some of 
the older men treated us to histories of the deeds that had 
been wrought upon the block of land. Some of their speeches 
— notably those of Aperahamj^ and Ihakara — were largely 
built up of legendary poems, but the orators quoted the poetry 
as such only when in doubt how far the sentiments were those 
of the assembled people : when they were backed by the hum 
which denotes applause, they at once commenced with singu- 
lar art to weave the poetry into that which was their own. 

As soon as the speeches were over, Hunia and Ihakara 
marched up to the flag-staff, carrying between them the deed 
of sale. Putting it down before Dr. Featherston, they shook 
hands with each other and with him, and swore that for the 
future there should be eternal friendship between their tribes. 
The deed was then signed by many hundred men and women, 
and Dr. Featherston started with Captain te Kepa, of the na- 
tive contingent, to fetch the £25,000 from Wanganui town, 
the Maories firing their rifles into the air as a salute. 

The superintendent was no sooner gone than a land of 
solemn grief seemed to come over the assembled people. Aft- 
er all, they were selling the graves ^of their ancestors, they ar- 
gued. The wife of Hamuera, seizing her husband's green- 
stone club, ran out from the ranks of the women, and began 
to intone an impromptu song, which was echoed by the wom- 
en in a pathetic chorus-chant: 

" The sun shines, but we quit our land ; we abandon forever its forests, its 

mountains, its groves, its lakes, its shores. 
All its fair fisheries, here, under the bright sun, forever we renounce. 
It is a lovely day ; fair will be the children that are born to-day ; but wo 

quit our land. 
In some parts there is forest ; in others, the ground is skimmed over by 

the birds in their flight. 
Upon the trees there is fruit ; in the streams, fish ; in the fields, potatoes ; 

fern-roots in the bush ; but we quit our land." 

It is in chorus-speeches of this kind that David's psalms 
must have been recited by the Jews ; but on this occasion 
there was a good deal of mere acting in the grief, for the 
tribes had never occupied the land that they now sold. 

The next day Dr. Featherston drove into camp, surrounded 
by a brilliant cavalcade of Maori cavalry, amid much yelling 
and firing of pieces skyward. Hunia, in receiving him, de- 



Parewanui Pah. 263 

clared that he would not have the money paid till the morrow, 
as the sun must shine upon the transfer of the lands. It 
would take his people all the night, he said to work themselves 
up to the right pitch for a war-dance ; so he sent down a 
strong guard to watch the money-chests, which had been con- 
veyed to the missionary hut. The Ngatiapa sentry posted 
inside the room was an odd cross between savagery and civil- 
ization ; he wore the cap of the native contmgent, and noth- 
ing else but a red kilt. He was armed with a short Wilkin- 
son rifle, for which he had, however, not a round of ammuni- 
tion, his cartridges being Enfield, and his piece unloaded. 
Barbarian or not, he seemed to like raw gin, with which some 
Englishman had unlawfully and unfairly tempted him. 

In the morning the money was handed over in the runan- 
ga-house, and a signet-ring presented to Hunia by Dr. Feath- 
erston in pledge of peace, and memory of the sale ; but, owing 
to the heat, we soon adjourned to the karaka grove, where 
Hunia made a congratulatory and somewhat boastful speech, 
offering his friendship and alliance to Dr. Featherston. 

The assembly was soon dismissed, and the chiefs withdrew 
to prepare for the grandest war-dance that had been seen for 
years, while a party went off to catch and kill the oxen that 
were to be " steamed " whole, just as our friends' fathers 
would have steamed us. 

A chief was detached by Hunia to guide us to a hill wiience 
we commanded the whole glade. No sooner had we taken 
our seats than the I^gatiraukawa to the number of a hundred 
fighting-men, armed with spears, and led by a dozen women 
bearing clubs, marched out from their camp, and formed in 
column, their chiefs making speeches of exhortation from the 
ranks. After a pause, we heard the measured groaning of a 
distant haka, and, looking up the glade, at the distance of a 
mile saw some two-score Wanganui warriors jumpmg in per- 
fect time, now to one side, now to the other, grasping their 
rifles by the barrel, and raising them as one man each time 
they jumped. Presently, bending one knee, but stiffening the 
other leg, they advanced, stepping together with a hopping 
movement, slapping their hips and thighs, and shouting from 
the palate " Hough ! Hough !" with fearful emphasis. 

A shout from the ISTgatiraukawa hailed the approach of the 



264 Greater Britain. 

Ngatiapa, who deployed from the woods some two hundred 
strong, all armed with Enfield rifles. They united with the 
Wanganuis, and marched slowly down with their rifles at the 
" charge," steadily singing war-songs. When within a hun- 
dred yards of the opposing rank, they halted, and sent in their 
challenge. The Ngatiraukawa and Ngatiapa heralds passed 
each other in silence, and each delivered his message to the 
hostile chief. 

We could see that the allies were led by Hunia in all the 
bravery of his war costume. In his hair he wore a heron 
plume, and another was fastened near the muzzle of his short 
carbine : his limbs were bare, but about his shoulders he had 
a pure white scarf of satin. His kilt was gauze silk, of three 
colors — pink, emerald, and cherry — arranged in such a way as 
to show as much of the green as of the two other colors. The 
contrast, which upon a white skin would have been glaring in 
its ugliness, was perfect when backed by the nut-brown of 
Hunia's chest and legs. As he ran before his tribe, he was 
the ideal savage. 

The' instant that the heralds had returned, a charge took 
place, the forces passing through each other's ranks as they 
do upon the stage, but with frightful yells. After this, they 
formed two deep, in three companies, and danced the " mus- 
ket-exercise war-dance " in wonderful time, the women lead- 
ing, thrusting out their tongues, and shaking their long, pend- 
ent breasts. Among them was Hamuera's wife, standing 
drawn up to her full height, her limbs stiffened, her head 
thrown back, her mouth wide open, and tongue protruding, 
her eyes rolled so as to show the w^hite, and her arms stretch- 
ed out in fi'ont of her, as she slowly chanted. The illusion 
was perfect : she became for the time a mad prophetess ; yet 
all the frenzy was assumed at a whim, to be cast aside in half 
an hour. The shouts were of the same under-breath kind as 
in the haka, but they were aided by the sounds of horns and 
conch-shells, and, from the number of men engaged, the noise 
w^as this time terrible. After much fierce singing, the mus- 
ket-dance was repeated, with furious leaps and gestures, till the 
men became utterly exhausted, when the review was closed by 
a general discharge of rifles. Running with nimble feet, the 
dancers were soon back within their pahs, and the feast be- 



Tarewanui Pah. 265 

ginning now, was, like a Russian banquet, prolonged till morn- 
ing. 

It is not hard to understand the conduct of Lord Durham's 
settlers, who landed here in 1837. The friendly natives re- 
ceived the party with a war-dance, which had upon them such 
an effect that they immediately took ship for Australia, where 
they remained. 

The next day, when we called on Governor Hunia at his 
wahre to bid him farewell before our departure for the capi- 
tal, he made two speeches to us, which are worth recording, 
as specimens of Maori oratory. Speaking through Mr. BuUer, 
who had been kind enough to escort us to the !N"gatiapa's 
wahre, Hunia said : 

"Hail, guests ! You have just now seen the settlement of 
a great dispute — the greatest of modern time. 

" This was a weighty trouble — a grave difficulty. 

" Many Pakehas have tried to settle it in vain. For Peta- 
tone was it reserved to end it. I have said that great is our 
gratitude to Petatone. 

" If Petatone hath need of me in the future, I shall be there. 
If he climbs the lofty tree, I will climb it with him. If he 
scales high cliffs, I will scale them too. If Petatone needeth 
help, he shall have it ; and where he leads, there will I follow. 

*' Such are the words of Hunia." 

To this speech one of us replied, explaining our position as 
guests from Britain. 

Hunia then began again to speak : 

" O iny guests, a few days since, when asked for a war- 
dance, I refused. I refused, because my people were sad at 
heart. 

" We were loth to refuse our guests, but the tribes were 
grieved ; the people were sorrowful at heart. 

" To-day we are happy, and the war-dance has taken place. 

" O my guests, when ye return to our great queen, tell her 
that we will fight for her again as we have fought before. 

" She is our queen as well as your queen — Queen of Maories, 
Queen of Pakeha. 

" Should wars arise, we will take up our rifles, and march 
whithersoever she shall direct. 

" You have heard of the King movement. I was a Kingite ; 

M 



266 Greater Britain. 

but that did not prevent me fighting for the queen — ^I and my 
chiefs. 

" My cousin, Wiremu, went to England, and saw our queen. 
He returned. ... 

" When you landed in this island, he was already dead. . . . 

" He died fighting for our queen. 

" As he died, we will die, if need be — I and all my chiefs. 
This do you tell our queen. 

" I have said." 

This passage, spoken as Hunia spoke it, was one of noble 
eloquence and singular rhetoric art. The few first words 
about Wiremu were spoken in a half -indifferent way; but 
there was a long pause before and after the statement that he 
was dead, and a sinking of the voice when he related how 
Wiremu had died, followed by a burst of sudden fire in the 
" As he died, we will die — ^I and all my chiefs." 

After a minute or two, Hunia resumed : 

" This is another word. 

" We are all of us glad to see you. 

" When we wrote to Petatone, we asked him that he would 
bring with him Pakehas from England and from Australia — 
Pakehas from all parts of the queen's broad lands. 

" Pakehas who should return to tell the queen that the N'ga- 
tiapa are her liegemen. 

"We are much rejoiced that you are here. May your 
heart rest here among us ; but if you go once more to your 
English home, tell the people that we are Petatone's faithful 
subjects and the queen's. 

" I have said." 

After pledging Hunia in a cup of wine, we returned to our 
temporary home. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE MAORIES. 



Paeting with my companions (who were going north- 
ward), in order that I might return to Wellington and thence 
take ship to Taranaki, I started at daybreak on a lovely morn- 
ing to walk by the sea-shore to Otaki. As I left the bank of 



The Maories. 267 

the Manawatu River for the sands, Mount Egmont, near Tara- 
naki, and Mounts Ruapehu and Tongariro, in the centre of 
the island, hung their great snow-domes in the soft blue of the 
sky behind me, and seemed to have parted from their bases. 

I soon passed through the flax-swamp where we for days 
had shot the pukeko, and coming out upon the wet sands, 
which here are glittering and full of the Taranaki steel, I took 
off boots and socks, and trudged the whole distance barefoot, 
regardless of the morrow. It was hard to walk without 
crunching with the heel shells which would be thought rare at 
home, and here and there charming little tern and other tiny 
sea-fowl flew at me, and all but pecked my eyes out for com- 
ing near their nests. 

During the day I forded two large rivers and small streams 
innumerable, and swam the Ohau, where Dr. Featherston last 
week lost his dog-cart in the quicksands, but I managed to 
reach Otaki before sunset, in time to revel in a typical New 
Zealand view. The foreground was composed of ancient 
sand-hills, covered with the native flax, with the deliciously- 
scented Manuka ti-tree, brilliant in white flower, and with 
giant fern, tuft-grass, and tussac. Farther inland was the 
bush, evergreen, bunch-like in its foliage, and so overladen 
with parasitic vegetation that the true leaves were hidden by 
usurpers, or crushed to death in the folds of snake-like creep- 
ers. The view was bounded by bi^shrclad mountains, rosy 
with the sunset tints. 

Otaki is Archdeacon Hadfield's church settlement of Chris- 
tian Maories ; but of late there have been signs of wavering 
in the tribes, and I found Major Edwardes, who had been with 
us at Parewanui, engaged in holding, for the Government, a 
runanga of Hau-haus, or anti-Christian Maories, in the Otaki 
Pah. Some of these fellows had lately held a meeting, and 
had themselves re -baptized, but this time out of, instead of 
i7ito, the Church. They received fresh names, and are said to 
have politely invited the archdeacon to perform the ceremony. 

Maori Church of Englandism has proved a failure. A 
dozen native clergymen are, it is true, supported in comfort 
by their countrymen, but the tribes would support a hundred 
such, if necessary, rather than give up the fertile "reserva- 
tions," such as that of Otaki, which their pretended Christian- 



268 Greater Britain. 

ity has secured. There is much in the Maori that is tiger- 
like, and it is in the blood, not to be drawn out of it by a few 
years of playing at Christianity. 

The labors of the missionaries have been great, their earn- 
estness and devotion unsurpassed. Up to the day of the out- 
break of Hau-hauism, their influence with the natives was 
thought to be enormous. The entire Maori race had been bap- 
tized, thousands of natives had attended the schools, hundreds 
had become communicants and catechists. In a day the num- 
ber of native Christians was reduced from thirty thousand to 
some hundreds. Right and left the tribes flocked to the busli, 
deserting mission-stations, villages, herds, and fields. Those 
few who dared not go were there in spirit ; all sympathized, if 
not with the Hau-hau "movement, at least with Kingism. The 
archdeacon and his brethren of the holy calling were at their 
wits' ends. Not only did Christianity disappear ; civilization 
itself accompanied religion in her flight, and habits of blood- 
shed and barbarity, unknown since the nominal renunciation 
of idolatry, in a day returnedo The fall was terrible, but it 
went to show that the apparent success had been fictitious. 
The natives had built mills and owned ships ; they had learn- 
ed husbandry and cattle-breeding ; they had invested money, 
and put acre to acre, and house to house ; but their moral could 
hardly have kept pace with their material, or even with their 
mental gains. 

A magistrate who knows the Maories well told me that 
their Christianity is only on the surface. He one day asked 
Matene te Whiwhi, a Ngatiraukawa chief, " Which would 
you soonest eat, Matene — pork, beef, or Ngatiapa ?" Matene 
answered, with a turn-up of his eyes, "Ah ! I'm a Christian !" 
" Never mind that to me, you know," said the Englishman. 
" The flesh of Ngatiapa is sweet," said Matene, with a smack 
of the lips that was distinctly audible. The settlers tell you 
that when the Maories go to war, they use up their Bibles for 
gun-wadding, and then come on the missionaries for a fresh 
supply. 

The Polynesians, when Christianity is first presented to 
them, embrace it with excitement and enthusiasm ; the " new 
religion" spreads like wildfire; the success of the teachers is 
amazing. A few years, however, show a terrible change. 



The Maoeies. 269 

The natives find that all white men are not missionaries ; that 
if one set of Enghshmen deplore their licentiousness, there are 
others to back them in it ; that Christianity requires self-re- 
straint. As soon as the first flare of the new religion is over, 
it commences to decline, and in some cases it expires. The 
story of Christianity in Hawaii, in Otaheite, and in New Zea- 
land, has been much the same : among the Tahitians, it was 
crushed by the relapse of the converts into extreme licentious- 
ness ; among the Maories, it was put down by the sudden rise of 
the Hau-hau fanaticism. A return to a better state of things 
has in each case followed, but the missionaries work now in a 
depressed and saddened way, which contrasts sternly with the 
exultation that inspired them before the fresh outbreak of the 
demon which they believed they had exorcised. They re- 
luctantly admit that the Polynesians are fickle as well as 
gross ; not only licentious, but untrustworthy. There is, they 
will tell you, no country where it is so easy to plant or so 
hard to maintain Christianity. • 

The Maori religion is that of all the Polynesians — a vague 
polytheism, which in their poems seems now and then to ap- 
proach to pantheism. The forest glades, the mountain rocks, 
the stormy shores, ah swarm with fairy singers, and with 
throngs of gnomes and elves. The happy, laughing island- 
ers have a heaven, but no hell in their mythology ; of " sin " 
they have no conception. Hau-hauism is not a Polynesian 
creed, but a political and religious system based upon the 
earlier books of the Old Testament ; even the cannibalism 
which was added was not of the Polynesian kind. The In- 
dians of Chili ate human flesh for pleasure and variety ; those 
of Virginia were cannibals only on state occasions, or in re- 
ligious ceremonials ; but the Maories seem originally to have 
been driven to man-eating by sheer want of food. Since 
Cook left pigs upon the islands, the excuse has been wanting, 
and the practice has consequently ceased. As revived by the 
Hau-haus, the man-eating was of a ceremonial nature, and, 
like the whole of the observances of the Hau-hau fanaticism, 
an inroad upon ancient Maori customs. 

There is one great difference which severs the Maories 
from the other Polynesians. In ISTew Zealand caste is un- 
known ; every Maori is a gentleman or a slave. Chiefs are 



270 Greater Britain. 

elected by the popular voice, not, indeed, by a show of hands, 
but by a sort of general agreement of the tribe ; but the chief 
is a political, not a social superior. In the windy climate of 
Kew Zealand, men can push themselves to the front too sure- 
ly by their energy and toil, to remain socially in an inferior 
class. Caste is impossible where the climate necessitates 
activity and work. The Maories, too, we should remember, 
are an immigrant race ; probably no high-caste men came 
with them — all started from equal rank. 

Like the Tongans, the Maories pay great reverence to their 
well - born women ; slave - women are of no account. The 
Friendly Islanders exclude both man and woman slave from 
the future life ; but the Maori Rangatira not only admits his 
followers to heaven, but his wife to council. A Maori chief 
is as obedient to the warlike biddings, and as grateful for the 
praising glance or smile of his betrothed, as a planter-cavalier 
of Carolina or a Cretan volunteer ; and even the ladies of 
New Orleans can not have gone farther than the wives of 
Hunia and Ihakara in spurring on the men to war. The 
Maori Andromaches outdo their European sisters, for they 
themselves proceed to battle, and animate their Hectors by 
songs and shouts. Even the sceptre of tribal rule — the green- 
stone meri, or royal club — is often intrusted them by their war- 
rior husbands, and used to lead the war-dance or the charge. 

The delicacy of treatment shown by the Maories toward 
their women may go far to account for the absence of con- 
tempt for the native race among the English population. An 
Englishman's respect for the sex is terribly shocked when 
he sees a woman staggering under the weight of the wigwam 
and the children of a " brave," who stalks behind her through 
the streets of Austin, carrying his rifles and his pistols, but 
not another ounce, unless in the shape of a thong with which 
to hasten the squaw's steps. What wonder if the men who 
sit by smoking while their wives totter under basketsful of 
mould on the boulevard works at Delhi are called lazy scoun- 
drels by the press of the North - west, or if the Shoshones, 
who eat the bread of idleness themselves, and hire out their 
wives to the Pacific Railroad Company, are looked upon as 
worse than dogs in Nevada, where the thing is done? It is 
the New Zealand native's treatment of his wife that makes it 



The Maories. 271 

possible for an honest Englishman to respect or love an hon- 
est Maori. 

In general, the newspaper editors and idle talkers of the 
frontier districts of a colony in savage lands speak with min- 
gled ridicule and contempt of the men with whom they daily 
struggle ; at best, they see in them no virtue but ferocious 
bravery. The Kansas and Colorado papers call Indians 
"fiends," "devils," or dismiss them laughingly in peaceful 
times as " bucks," whose lives are worth, perhaps, a buffalo's, 
but who are worthy of notice only as potential murderers or 
thieves. Such, too, is the tone of the Australian press con- 
cerning the aboriginal inhabitants of Queensland or Tasmania. 
Far otherwise do the New Zealand papers speak of the Maori 
warriors. They may sometimes call them grasping, over- 
reaching traders, or underrate their capability of receiving 
civilization of a European kind, but never do they affect to 
think them less than men, or to advocate the employment 
toward them of measures which would be repressed as infa- 
mous if applied to brutes. We should, I think, see in this 
peculiarity of conduct, not evidence of the existence in ISTew 
Zealand of a spirit more catholic and tolerant toward savage 
neighbors than that which the English race displays in Aus- 
tralia or America, but rather a tribute to the superiority in 
virtue, intelligence, and nobiUty of mind possessed by the 
Maori over the Red Indian or the Australian black. 

It is not only in their treatment of their women that the 
Maories show their chivalry. One of the most noble traits of 
this great people is their habit of " proclaiming " the districts 
in which lies the cause of war as the sole fighting-ground, 
and never .touching their enemies, however defenseless, when 
found elsewhere. European nations might take a lesson from 
'New Zealand Maories in this and other points. 

The Maories are apt at learning, merry, and, unlike other 
Polynesians, trustworthy, but also, unlike them, mercenary. 
At the time of the Manawatu sale, old Aperahama used to 
write to Dr. Featherston almost every day : " O Petatone, let 
the price of the block be £9,999,999 19s. 9c?.," the mysteries 
of eleven pence thi*ee-farthings being far beyond his compre- 
hension. The Maories have, too, a royal magnificence in their 
ideas of gifts and grants — witness Te Heke's bid of 100,000 



272 Greater Britain. 

acres of land for Governor Fitzi'oy's head, in answer to the 
offer by the governor of a small price for his. 

The praises of the Maories have been sung by so many 
writers, and in so many keys, that it is necessary to keep it 
distinctly before us that they are mere savages, though brave, 
shrewd men. There is an Eastern civilization — that of China 
and Hindostan — distinct fi*om that of Europe, and ancient be- 
yond all count ; in this the Maories have no share. No true 
Hindoo, no Arab, no Chinaman has suffered change in one 
tittle of his dress or manners from contact with the Western 
races ; of this essential conservatism there is in the New Zea- 
land savage not a trace. William Thompson, the Maori 
" king-maker," used to dress as any Englishman ; Maories on 
board our ships wear the uniform of the able-bodied seaman ; 
Governor Hunia has ridden as a gentleman-rider in a steeple- 
chase, equipped in jockey dress. 

Savages though they be, in irregular warfare we are not 
their match. At the end of 1865 we had, of regulars and mi- 
litia, seventeen thousand men under arms in the North Island 
of New Zealand, including no less than twelve regiments of 
the line at their " war strength," and yet our generals were 
despondent as to their chance of finally defeating the warriors 
of a people which — men, women, and children — ^numbered but 
thirty thousand souls. 

Men have sought far and wide for the reasons which led 
to our defeats in the New Zealand wars. We were defeated 
by the Maories, as the Austrians by the Prussians, and the 
French by the English in old times, because the victors were 
the better men. Not the braver men, when both sides were 
brave alike ; not the stronger ; not, perhaps, taking the aver- 
age of our officers and men, the more intelligent ; but capable 
of quicker movement, able to subsist on less, more crafty, 
more skilled in the thousand tactics of the bush. Aided by 
their women, who, when need was, themselves would lead the 
charge, and who at all times dug their fern-root and caught 
their fish ; marching where our regiments could not follow, 
they had, as have the Indians in America, the choice of time 
and place for their attacks ; and while we were crawling about 
our military roads upon the coast, incapable of traversing a 
mile of bush, the Maories moved securely and secretly from 



The Two Flies. 273 

one end to the other of the island. Arms they had, ammu- 
nition they could steal, and blockade was useless with enemies 
who live on fern-root. When they found that we burned 
their pahs, they ceased to build them ; that was all. When 
we brought up howitzers, they went where no howitzers could 
follow. It should not be hard even for our pride to allow 
that such enemies were, man for man, in their own lands our 
betters. 

All nations fond of horses, it has been said, flourish and 
succeed. The Maories love horses, and ride well. All races 
that delight in sea are equally certain to prosper, empirical 
philosophers will tell us. The Maories own ships by the score, 
and serve as sailors whenever they get a chance : as deep-sea 
fishermen, they have no equals. Their fondness for draughts 
shows mathematical capacity ; in truthfulness, they possess 
the first of virtues. They are shrewd, thrifty ; devoted friends, 
brave men. With all this, they die. 

" Can you stay the surf which beats on Wanganui shore ?" 
say the Maories of our progress ; and of themselves, " We are 
gone— like the moa." 



CHAPTER yi. 

THE TWO FLIES. 



" As the Pakeha fly has driven out the Maori fly ; 
As the Pakeha grass has killed the Maori grass ; 
As the Pakeha rat has slain the Maori rat ; 
As the Pakeha clover has starved the Maori fern, 
So will the Pakeha destroy the Maori." 

These are the mournful words of a well-known Maori 
song. 

That the English daisy, the white clover, the common this- 
tle, the camomile, the oat, should make their way rapidly in 
New Zealand and put down the native plants, is in no way 
strange. If the Maori grasses that have till lately held undis- 
turbed possession of the ISTew Zealand soil, require for their 
nourishment the substances A, B, and C, while the English 
clover needs A, B, and D, from the nature of things, A and B 
will be the coarser earths or salts, existing in larger quanti- 

M 2 



274 Geeater Britain. 

ties, not easily losing vigor and nourishing force, and recruit- 
ing their energies from the decay of the very plant that feeds 
on them; but C and D will be the more ethereal, the more 
easily destroyed or wasted substances. The Maori grass, 
having sucked nearly the whole of C from the soil, is in a 
weakly state, when in comes the English plant, and, finding 
an abundant store of untouched D, thrives accordingly, and 
crushes down the Maori. 

The positions of flies and grasses, of plants and insects, are, 
however, not the same. Adapted by nature to the infinite va- 
riety of soils and climates, there are an infinite number of dif- 
ferent plants and animals ; but whereas the plant depends upon 
both soil and climate, the animal depends chiefly upon climate, 
and little upon soil, except so far as his home or his food 
themselves depend on soil. Now, while soil wears out, cRmate 
does not. The climate in the long run remains the same, but 
certain apparently trifling constituents of the soil will wholly 
disappear. The result of this is, that while pigs may continue 
to thrive in New Zealand forever and a day, Dutch clover 
(without manure) will only last a given and calculable time. 

The case of the flies is plain enough. The Maori and the 
English fly live on the same food, and require about the same 
amount of warmth and moisture : the one which is best fitted 
to the common conditions will gain the day, and drive out the 
other. The English fly has had to contend not only against 
other English flies, but against every fly of temperate cli- 
mates : we having traded with every land, and brought the 
flies of every clime to England. The English fly is the best 
possible fly of the whole world, and will naturally beat down 
and exterminate, or else starve out, the merely provincial Ma- 
ori fly. If a great singer — to find whom for the London 
stage the world has been ransacked — should be led by the 
foible of the moment to sing for gain in an unknown village 
where, on the same night, a rustic tenor was attempting to 
sing his best^ the London tenor would send the provincial 
supperless to bed. So it is with the English and Maori fly. 

Natural selection is being conducted by nature in New 
Zealand on a grander scale than any we have contemplated, 
for the object of it here is man. In America, in Australia, 
the white man shoots or poisons his red or black fellow, and 



The Two Flies. 275 

exterminates him through the workings of superior knowl- 
edge ; but in New Zealand it is peacefully, and without extra- 
ordinary advantages, that the Pakeha beats his Maori brother. 

That which is true of our animal and vegetable produc- 
tions is true also of our man. The English fly, grass, and 
tnan, they and their progenitors before them, have had to fight 
for life against their fellows. The Englishman, bringing into 
his country from the parts to which he trades all manner of 
men, of grass seeds, and of insect germs, has filled his land 
with every kind of living thing to which his soil or climate 
will afford support. Both old inhabitants and interlopers 
have to maintain a struggle which at once crushes and starves 
out of life every weakly plant, man, or insect, and fortifies the 
race by continual buffetings. The plants of civilized man are 
generally those which will grow best in the greatest variety 
of soils and climates ; but in any case the English fauna and 
flora are peculiarly fitted to succeed at our antipodes, because 
the climates of Great Britain and New Zealand are almost 
the same, and our men, flies, and plants — the " pick " of the 
whole world — ^have not even to encounter the difficulties of 
acclimatization in their struggle against the weaker growths 
indigenous to the soil. 

Nature's work in New Zealand is not the same as that 
which she is quickly doing in North America, in Tasmania, in 
Queensland. It is not merely that a hunting and fighting 
people is being replaced by an agricultural and pastoral peo- 
ple, and must farm or die : the Maori does farm ; Maori chiefs 
own villages, build houses, which they let to European set- 
tlers ; we have here Maori sheep-farmers, Maori ship-owners, 
Maori mechanics, Maori soldiers, Maori rough-riders, Maori 
sailors, and even Maori traders. There is nothing which the 
average Englishman can do which the average Maori can not 
be taught to do as cheaply and as well. Nevertheless, the 
race dies out. The Red Indian dies because he can not farm ; 
the Maori farms, and dies. 

There are certam special features about the advance of the 
birds, beasts, and men of Western civilization. When the 
first white man landed in New Zealand, all the native quad- 
rupeds save one, and nearly all the birds and river-fishes were 
extinct, though we have their bones, and traditions of their 



276 Geeater Britain. 

existence. The Maories themselves were dying out. The 
moa and dinoris were both gone ; there were few insects, and 
no reptiles. " The birds die because the Maories, their com- 
panions, die," is the native saying. Yet the climate is sin^ 
gularly good, and food for beast and bird so plentiful that Cap- 
tain Cook's pigs have planted colonies of "wild boars" ii^ 
every part of the islands, and English pheasants have no soon- 
er been imported than they have commenced to swarm in 
every jungle. Even the Pakeha flea has come over in the 
ships, and wonderfully has he thriven. 

The terrible want of food for men that formerly character- 
ized New Zealand has had its effects upon the habits of the 
Maori race. Australia has no native fruit-trees worthy culti- 
vation, although in the whole world there is no such climate 
and soil for fruits ; still, Australia has kangaroos and other 
quadrupeds. The Ladrones were destitute of quadrupeds, 
and of birds, except the turtle-dove, but in the warm damp cli- 
mate fruits grew, sufficient to support in comfort a dense pop- 
ulation. In New Zealand the windy cold of the winters causes 
a need for something of a tougher fibre than the banana or the 
fern-root. There being no native beasts, the want was sup- 
plied by human flesh, and war, furnishing at once food and 
the excitement which the chase supplies to peoples that have 
animals to hunt, became the occupation of the Maories. 
Hence in some degree the depopulation of the land ; but other 
causes exist, by the side of which cannibalism is as nothing. 

The British Government has been less guilty than is com- 
monly believed as regards the destruction of the Maories. 
Since the original misdeed of the annexation of the isles, we 
have done the Maories no serious wrong. We recognized the 
claim of a handful of natives to the soil of a country as large 
as Great Britain, of not one-hundredth part of which had they 
ever made the smallest use ; and, disregarding the fact that 
our occupation of the coast was the very event that gave the 
land its value, we have msisted on buying every acre from the 
tribe. Allowing title by conquest to the Ngatiraukawa, as I 
saw at Parewanui Pah, we refuse to claim even the lands we 
conquered from the " Kingites." 

The Maories have always been a village people, tilling a 
Uttle land round their pahs, but incapable of making any use 



The Two Flies. 277 

of the great pastures and wheat countries which they " own." 
Had we at first constituted native reserves on the American 
system, we might, without any fighting, and without any more 
rapid destruction of the natives than that which is taking 
place, have gradually cleared and brought into the market 
nearly the whole country, which now has to be purchased at 
enormous prices, and at the continual risk of war. 

As it is, the record of our dealings with the queen's native 
subjects in ISTew Zealand has been almost free from stain ; but 
if we have not committed crimes, we have certainly not failed 
to blunder : our treatment of William Thompson was at the 
best a grave mistake. If ever there lived a patriot, he was 
one, and through him we might have ruled in peace the Maori 
race. Instead of receiving the simplest courtesy from a peo- 
ple which in India showers honors upon its puppet-kings and 
rajahs, he underwent fresh insults each time that he entered 
an English town, or met a white magistrate or subaltern, and 
he died while I was in the colonies, according to Pakeha phy- 
sicians, of liver complaint; according to the Maories, of a 
broken heart. 

At Parewanui and Otaki, I remarked that the half-breeds 
are fine fellows, possessed of much of the nobility of both the 
ancestral races, while the women are famed for grace and 
loveliness. In miscegenation it would have seemed that there 
was a chance for the Maori, who, if destined to die, would at 
least have left many cTf his best features of body and mind to 
live in the mixed race, but here comes in the prejudice of 
blood, with which we have already met in the case of the ne- 
groes and Chinese. Morality has so far gained ground as 
greatly to check the spread of pernianent illegitimate con- 
nections with native women, while pride prevents intermar- 
riage. The numbers of the half-breeds are not upon the in- 
crease : a few fresh marriages supply the vacancies that come 
of death, but there is no progress, no sign of the creation of a 
vigorous mixed r^ce. There is something more in this than 
foolish pride, however ; there is a secret at the bottom at once 
of the cessation of mixed marriages and of the dwindling of 
the pure Maori race, and it is the utter viciousness of the na- 
tive girls. The universal unchastity of the unmarried women, 
" Christian " as well as heathen, would be sufficient to destroy 



278 Greater Britain". 

a race of gods. The story of the Maories is that of the Tahi- 
tians, and is written in the decorations of every gate-post or 
rafter in their pahs. 

We are more distressed at the present and future of the 
Maories than they are themselves. For all our greatness, 
we pity not the Maories more profoundly than they do us 
when, ascribing our morality to calculation, they bask in the 
sunlight, and are happy in their gracelessness. After all, vir- 
tue and arithmetic come from one Greek root. 



CHAPTER VIL 

THE PACIFIC. 

Closely resembling Great Britain in situation, size, and 
climate, New Zealand is often styled by the colonists " The 
Britain of the South," and many affect to believe that, her fu- 
ture is destined to be as brilliant as has been the past of her 
mother-country. With the exaggeration of phrase to which 
the English New Zealanders are prone, they prophesy a mar- 
vellous hereafter for the whole Pacific, in which New Zealand, 
as the carrying and manufacturing country, is to play the fore- 
most part, the Australias following obediently in her train. 

Even if the differences of Separatists, Provincialists, and 
Centralists should be healed, the future prosperity of New 
Zealand is by no means secure. Her gold-yield is only about 
a fifth of that of California or Victoria. Her area is not suf- 
ficient to make her powerful as an agricultural or pastoral 
country, unless she comes to attract manufactures and carry- 
ing-trade from afar, and the prospect of New Zealand succeed- 
ing in this effort is but small. Her rivers are almost useless 
for manufacturing purposes, owing to their floods ; the tim- 
ber-supply of all her forests is not equal to that of a single 
county in the State of Oregon ; her coal is inferior in quality 
to that of Vancouver's Island, in quantity to that of Chili, in 
both respects to that of New South Wales. The harbors of 
New Zealand are upon the eastern coasts, but the coal is 
chiefly npon the other side, where the river-bars make trade 
impossible. 

The coal that has been found at the Bay of Islands is said 



The Pacific. 279 

to be plentiful, and of good quality, and may be made largely 
available for steamers on the coast; the steel-sand of Tara- 
naki, smelted by the use of petroleum, also found within 
the province, may become of value ; her own wool, too, New 
Zealand will doubtless one day manufacture into cloth and 
blankets ; but these are comparatively trifling matters : N'ew 
Zealand may become rich and populous without being the 
great power of the Pacific, or even of the South. 

The climate of the North Island is winterless, moist, and 
warm, and its effects are already seen in a certain want of en- 
terprise shown by the Government and settlers. I remarked 
that the mail-steamers which leave Wellington almost every 
day are invariably " detained for dispatches :" it looks as 
though the officers of the Colonial or Imperial Government 
commence to write their letters only when the hour for the 
sailing of the ship has come. An Englishman visiting New 
Zealand was asked in my presence how long his business at 
Wanganui would keep him in the town. His answer was, 
"In London it would take me half an hour; so I suppose 
about a week — about a week !" 

In Java and the other islands of the Indian archipelago we 
find examples of the effect of the supineness of dwellers in 
the tropics upon the economic position of their countries. 
Many of the Indian isles possess both coal and cheap labor, 
but have failed to become manufacturing communities on a 
large scale only because the natives have not the energy re- 
quisite for the direction of factories and workshops, while 
European foremen have to be paid enormous wages, and, los- 
ing their spirit In the damp, unchanging climate of the islands, 
soon become more indolent than the natives. 

The position of the various stores of coal in the Pacific is 
of extreme importance as an index to the future distribution 
of power in that portion of the world ; but it is not enough to 
know where coal is to be found without looking also to the 
quantity, quality, cheapness of labor, and facility for trans- 
port. In China (in the Si Shan district) and in Borneo there 
are extensive coal-fields, but they lie " the wrong way " for 
trade. On the other hand, the Calif ornian coal — at Monte 
Diablo, San Diego, and Monterey — lies well, but is bad in 
quality. The Talcahuano bed in Chili is not good enough 



280 Geeater Britain. 

for ocean steamers, but might be made use of for manu- 
factures, although Chili has but little iron. Tasmania has 
good coal, but in no great quantity, and the beds nearest to 
the coast are formed of inferior anthracite. The three coun- 
tries of the Pacific which must, for a time at least, rise to 
manufacturing greatness, are Japan, Vancouver's Island, and 
New South Wales ; but which of these will become wealthiest 
and most powerful, depends ' mainly on the amount of coal 
which they respectively possess so situated as to be cheaply 
raised. The dearness of labor under which Vancouver suf- 
fers w^ill be removed by the opening of the Pacific Railroad, 
but for the present New South Wales has the cheaper labor ; 
and upon her shores at Newcastle are abundant stores of a 
coal of good quality for manufacturing purposes, although for 
sea use it burns " dirtily," and too fast : the colony possesses 
also ample beds of iron, copper, and lead. Japan, as far as 
can be at present seen, stands before Vancouver and New 
South Wales in almost every point : she has cheap labor, good 
climate, excellent harbors, and abundant coal ; cotton can be 
grown upon her soil, and this and that of Queensland she can 
manufacture and export to America and to the East. Wool 
from California and from the Australias might be carried to 
her to be worked ; and her rise to commercial greatness has 
already commenced with the passage of a law allowing Ja- 
panese workmen to take service with European capitalists in 
the " treaty-ports." Whether Japan or New South Wales is 
destined to become the great wool-manufacturing country, it 
is certain that fleeces will not long continue to be sent half 
round the world — from Australia to England — to be worked, 
and then round the other half back from England to Austra- 
lia, to be sold as blankets. 

The future of the Pacific shores is inevitably brilliant; but 
it is not New Zealand, the centre of the water-hemisphere, 
which will occupy the position that England has taken in the 
Atlantic, but some country such as Japan or Vancouver, jut- 
ting out into the ocean from Asia or from America, as En- 
gland juts out from Europe. If New South Wales usurps the 
position, it will be not from her geographical situation, but 
from the manufacturing advantages she gains by the posses- 
sion of vast mineral wealth. * 



The Pacific. 281 

The power of America is now predominant in the Pacific : 
the Sandwich Islands are all but annexed, Japan all but ruled 
by her, while the occupation of British Columbia is but a mat- 
ter of time, and a Mormon descent upon the Marquesas is al- 
ready planned. The relations of America and Australia will 
be the key to the future of the South Pacific. 

*ftt# •!* al0 «S« ^* •!* ^* •{• ^* 

^^ iji ^» •J* "J* •!• v^ ^* •!• 

On the 26th of December I left New Zealand for Aus- 
tralia. 



PART III.— AUSTRALIA. 



CHAPTER I. 

SYDNEY. 



At early light on Christmas Day, I put off from shore in 
one of those squalls for which Port Nicholson, the harbor of 
Wellington, is famed. A boat which started from the ship 
at the same time as mine from the land was upset, but in 
such shallow water that the passengers were saved, though 
they lost a portion of their baggage. As we flew toward 
the mail steamer, the Kaikoura^ the harbor was one vast 
sheet of foam, and columns of spray were being whirled in 
the air, and borne away far inland on the gale. We had 
placed at the helm a post-office clerk, who said that he could 
steer, but, as we reached the steamer's side, instead of luff- 
ing-up, he suddenly put the helm hard a-weather, and we 
shot astern of her, running violently before the wind, al- 
though our treble-reefed sail was by this time altogether 
down. A rope was thrown us from a coal-hulk, and, catch- 
ing it, we were soon on board, and spent our Christmas 
walking up and down her deck on the slippery black dust, 
and watching the effects of the gale. After some hours, the 
wind moderated, and I reached the Kaikoura just before she 
sailed. While we were steaming out of the harbor through 
the boil of waters that marks the position of the submarine 
crater, I found that there was but one other passenger for 
Australia to share with me the services of ten officers and 
ninety men, and the accommodations of a ship of 1500 tons. 
"Serious preparations and a large ship for a mere voyage 
from one Australasian colony to another," I felt inclined to 
say, but during the voyage and my first week in New South 



Sydney. 283 

Wales I began to discover that in England we are given 
over to a singular delusion as to the connection of New Zea- 
land and Australia. 

Australasia is a term much used at home to express the 
whole of our Antipodean possessions ; in the colonies them- 
selves, the name is almost unknown, or, if used, is meant to 
embrace Australia and Tasmania, not Australia and New 
Zealand. The only reference to New Zealand, except in the 
way of foreign news, that I ever found in an Australian pa- 
per, was a congratulatory paragraph on the amount of the 
New Zealand debt ; the only allusion to Australia that I 
detected in the Wellington Independent was in a glance at 
the future of the colony, in which the editor predicted the 
advent of a time when New Zealand would be a naval na- 
tion, and her fleet engaged in bombarding Melbourne, or 
levying contributions upon Sydney. 

New Zealand, though a change for the better is at hand, 
has hitherto been mainly an aristocratic country ; New South 
Wales and Victoria mainly democratic. Had Australia and 
New Zealand been close together, instead of as far apart as 
Africa and South America, there could have been no political 
connection between them so long as the traditions of their first 
settlement endured. Not only is the name "Australasia" 
politically meaningless, however, but it is also geographical- 
ly incorrect, for New Zealand and Australia are as complete- 
ly separated from each other as Great Britain and Massachu- 
setts. No promontory of Australia runs out to within 1000 
miles of any New Zealand cape ; the distance between Syd- 
ney and Wellington is 1400 miles; from Sydney to Auckland 
is as far. The distance from the nearest point of New Zea- 
land of Tasman's Peninsula, which itself projects somewhat 
from Tasmania, is greater than that of London from Algiers : 
from Wellington to Sydney, opposite ports, is as far as from 
Manchester to Iceland, or from Africa to Brazil. 

The sea that lies between the two great countries of the 
South is not, like the Central or North Pacific, a sea bridged 
with islands, ruffled with trade-winds, or overspread with a 
calm that permits the presence of light-draught paddle steam- 
ers. The seas which separate Australia from New Zealand 
are cold, bottomless, without islands, torn by Arctic cur- 



284 Greater Britaiist. 

rents, swept by polar gales, and traversed in all weathers 
by a mountain swell. After the gale of Christmas Day, we 
were blessed with a continuance of light breezes on our way 
to Sydney, but never did we escape the long rolling hills of 
seas that seemed to surge up from the Antartic pole : our 
screw was as often out of as in the water ; and, in a fast new 
ship, we could scarcely average nine knots an hour through- 
out the day. The ship which had brought the last Austra- 
lian mail to Wellington before we sailed was struck by a sea 
which swept her from stem to stern, and filled her cabins 
two feet deep, and this in December, which here is midsum- 
mer and answers to our July. Not only is the intervening 
ocean wide and cold, but N'ew Zealand presents to Australia 
a rugged coast, guarded by reefs and bars and backed by a 
snowy range, while she turns toward Polynesia and America 
all her ports and bays. 

No two countries in the world are so wholly distinct as 
Australia and New Zealand. The islands of New Zealand 
are inhabited by Polynesians, the Australian continent by 
negroes. New Zealand is ethnologically nearer to America, 
Australia to Africa, than New Zealand to Australia. 

If we turn from ethnology to scenery and climate, the 
countries are still more distinct. New Zealand is one of the 
groups of volcanic islands that stud the Pacific throughout 
its whole extent; tremendous clifis surround it on almost 
every side ; a great mountain chain runs through both islands 
from north to south ; hot springs abound, often close to gla- 
ciers and eternal snows ; earthquakes are common, and active 
volcanoes not unknown. The New Zealand climate is damp 
and windy ; the land is covered in most parts with a tangled 
jungle of tree-ferns, creepers, and parasitic plants ; water 
never fails, and, though winter is unknown, the summer heat 
is never great ; the islands are always green. Australia has 
for the most part flat, yellow, sun-burnt shores ; the soil may 
be rich, the country good for wheat and sheep, but to the 
eye it is an arid plain ; the winters are pleasant, but in the 
hot weather the thermometer rises higher than it does in In- 
dia, and dust-storms and hot winds sweep the land from end 
to end. It is impossible to conceive countries more unlike 
each other than are our two great dominions of the south. 



Sydney. 285 

Their very fossils are as dissimilar as are their flora and fauna 
of our time. 

At dawn of the first day of the new year we sighted the 
rocks where the Duncan Dunhar was lost with all hands, 
and a few minutes afterward we were boarded by the crew 
engaged by the Sydney Morning Herald^ who had been ly- 
ing at " The Heads" all night, to intercept our news and tel- 
egraph it to the city. The pilot and regular news-boat hail- 
ed us a little later, when we had fired a gun. The contrast 
between this Australian energy and the supineness of the 
New Zealanders was striking, but not more so than that be- 
tween my first view of Australia and my last view of ISTew 
Zealand. Six days earlier I had lost sight of the snowy peak 
of Mount Egmont, graceful as the Cretan Ida, while we ran 
before a strong breeze, in the bright English sunlight of the 
New Zealand afternoon, the albatrosses screaming around 
our stern : to-day, as we steamed up Port Jackson toward 
Sydney Cove, in the dead stillness that follows a night of 
oven-like heat, the sun rose flaming in a lurid sky, and struck 
down upon brown earth, yellow grass, and the thin, shadeless 
foliage of the Australian bush, while, as we anchored, the 
ceaseless chirping of the cricket in the grass and trees struck 
harshly on the ear. 

The harbor, commercially the finest in the world, is not 
without a singular beauty if seen at the best time. By the 
" hot-wind sunrise," as I first saw it, the heat and glare de- 
stroy the feeling of repose which the endless succession of 
deep, sheltered coves would otherwise convey ; but if it be 
seen from shore in the afternoon, when the sea-breeze has 
sprung up, turning the sky from red to blue, all is changed. 
From a neck of land that leads out to the Government-house 
you catch a glimpse of an arm of the bay on either side rip- 
pled with the cool wind, intensely blue, and dotted with 
white sails : the brightness of the colors that the sea-breeze 
brings almost atones for the wind's unhealthiness. 

In the upper portion of the town the scene is less pictur- 
esque ; the houses are of the commonplace English ugliness, 
worst of all possible forms of architectural imbecility, and 
are built, too, as though for English fogs, instead of semi- 
tropical heat and sun. Water is not to be had, and tbe 



286 Greater Britain. 

streets are given up to clouds of dust, while not a single 
shade-tree breaks the rays of the almost vertical sun. 

The afternoon of New-year's Day I spent at the " Midsum- 
mer Meeting " of the Sydney Jockey Club on the race-course 
near the city, where I found a vast crowd of holiday-makers 
assembled on the bare red earth that did duty for " turf," 
although there was a hot wind blowing, and the thermome- 
ter stood at 103° in the shade. For my conveyance to the 
race-course I trusted to one of the Australian Hansom cabs, 
made with fixed Venetian blinds on either side, so as to allow 
a free draught of air. 

The ladies in the grand stand were scarcely to be distin- 
guished from Englishwomen in dress or countenance, but the 
crowd presented several curious types. The fitness of the 
term " corn-stalks " applied to the Australian-born boys was 
made evident by a glance at their height and slender build ; 
they have plenty of activity and health, but are wanting in 
power and weight. The girls, too, are slight and thin ; deli- 
cate, without being sickly. Grown men, who have emigrated 
as lads and lived ten or fifteen years in New Zealand, eating 
much meat, spending their days in the open air, constantly 
in the saddle, are burly, bearded, strapping fellows, physical- 
ly the perfection of the English race, but wanting in refine- 
ment and grace of mind, and this apparently by constitution ; 
not through the accident of occupation or position. In Aus- 
tralia there is promise of a more intellectual nation: the 
young Australians ride as well, shoot as well, swim as well 
as the New Zealanders ; are as little given to book-learning, 
but there is more shrewd intelligence, more wit and quick- 
ness, in the sons of the larger continent. The Australians 
boast that they possess the Grecian climate, and every young 
face in the Sydney crowd showed me that their sky is not 
more like that of the Peloponnesus than they are like the old 
Athenians. The eager burning democracy that is springing 
up in the Australian great towns is as widely difierent from 
the republicanism of the older States of the American Union 
as it is from the good-natured conservatism of New Zealand ; 
and their high capacity for personal enjoyment would of it- 
self suffice to distinguish the Australians from both Ameri- 
cans and British. Large as must be the amount of convict 



Sydney. 287 

blood in New South "Wales, there was no trace of it in the 
features of those present upon the race-course. The inhabit- 
ants of colonies which have never received felon immigrants 
often cry out that Sydney is a convict city, but the preju- 
dice is not borne out by the countenances of the inhabitants, 
nor by the records of local crime. The black stain has not 
yet wholly disappeared: the streets of Sydney are still a 
greater disgrace to civilization than are even those of Lon- 
don ; but, putting the lighter immoralities aside, security for 
life and property is not more perfect in England than in New 
South Wales. The last of the bush-rangers were taken while 
I was in Sydney. 

The race-day was followed by a succession of hot winds, 
during which only the excellence of the fruit-market made 
Sydney endurable. Not only are all the English fruits to be 
found, but plantains, guavas, oranges, loquats, pomegranates, 
pine-apples from Brisbane, figs of every kind, and the delicious 
passion-fruit abound ; and if the gum-tree forests yield no sha- 
dy spots for picnics, they are not wanting among the rocks at 
Botany, or in the luxuriant orange-groves of Paramatta. 

A Christmas week of heat such as Sydney has seldom 
known was brought to a close by one of the heaviest south- 
erly storms on record. During the stifling morning the tele- 
graph had announced the approach of a gale from the far 
south, but in the early afternoon the heat was more terrible 
than before, when suddenly the sky was dark with whirling 
clouds, and a cold blast swept through the streets, carrying 
a fog of sand, breaking roofs and windows, and dashing to 
pieces many boats. When the gale ceased, some three hours 
later, the sand was so deep in houses that here and there 
men's feet left footprints on the stairs. 

Storms of this kind, differing only one from another in vio- 
lence, are common in the hot weather : they are known as 
"southerly bursters;" but the early settlers called them 
" brick-fielders," in the belief that the dust they brought was 
whirled up from the kilns and brick-fields to the south of 
Sydney. The fact is, that the sand is carried along for one 
or two hundred miles from the plains in Dampier and Auck- 
land counties ; for the Australian " burster " is one with the 
Punjaub dust-storm and the " dirt-storm " of Colorado. 



288 GrREATEB BRITAIN. 



CHAPTER n. 

RIVAL COLON^IES. . 

N'ew South Wales, born in 1788, and Queensland, in 1859, 
the oldest and youngest of our Australian colonies, stand side 
by side upon the map, and have a common frontier of 700 miles. 

The New South Welsh cast jealous glances toward the 
more recently founded States. Upon the brilliant prosperity 
of Victoria they looked doubtingly, and, ascribing it merely 
to the gold-fields, talk of " shoddy ;" but of Queensland — an 
agricultural country, with larger tracts of rich land than they 
themselves possess — the Sydney folks are not without reason 
envious. 

A terrible depression is at present pervading trade and 
agriculture in New South Wales. Much land near Sydney 
has gone out of cultivation ; hands are scarce, and the gold 
discoveries in the neighboring colonies, by drawing off the 
surplus population, have made harvest labor unattainable. 
Many properties have fallen to one-third their former value, 
and the colony — a wheat-growing country — is now import- 
ing wheat and flour to the value of half a million sterling 
every year. 

The depressed condition of affairs is the result partly of 
commercial panics following a period of inflation, partly of 
bad seasons, now bringing floods, now drought and rust, and 
partly of the discouragement of immigration by the colonial 
democrats — a policy which however beneficial to Australia 
it may in the long run prove, is for the moment ruinous to 
the sheep-farmers and to the merchants in the towns. On 
the other hand, the laborers for their part assert that the ar- 
rivals of strangers — at all events, of skilled artisans — are Still 
excessive, and that all the ills of the colony are due to over- 
immigration and free trade. • 

To a stranger, the rush of population and outpour of cap- 
ital from Sydney, first toward Victoria, but now to Queens- 
land and New Zealand, appear to be the chief among the 
causes of the momentary decline of New South Wales, Of 



290 Greater Britain. 

immigrants there is at once an insufficient and an overgreat 
supply. Respectable servant-girls, carpenters, masons, black- 
smiths, plasterers, and the like, do well in the colonies, and 
are always wanted ; of clerks, governesses, iron-workers, and 
the skilled hands of manufacturers there is almost an over- 
supply. By a perverse fate, these latter are the immigrants 
of whom thousands seek the colonies every year, in spite of 
the daily publication in England of dissuading letters. 

As the rivalry of the neighbor-colonies lessens in the lapse 
of time, the jealousy that exists between them will doubtless 
die away ; but it seems as though it will be replaced by a po- 
litical divergence and consequent aversion, which will form 
a fruitful source of danger to the Australian confederation. 

In Queensland the great tenants of Crown lands — "squat- 
ters" as they are called — sheep-farmers holding vast tracts 
of inland country, are in possession of the Government, and 
administer the laws to their own advantage. In New South 
Wales power is divided between the pastoral tenants on the 
one hand, and the democracy of the towns upon the other. 
In Victoria the democrats have beaten down the squatters, 
and in the interests of the people put an end to their reign ; 
but the sheep-farmers of Queensland and of the interior dis- 
tricts of New South Wales, ignoring wells, assert that the 
"up-country desert," or "unwatered tracts," can never be 
made available for agriculture, while the democracy of the 
coast point to the fact that the same statements were made 
only a few years back of lands now bearing a prosperous 
population of agricultural settlers. 

The struggle between the great Crown tenants and the 
agricultural democracy in Victoria, already almost over, in 
New South Wales can be decided only in one way; but in 
Queensland the character of the country is not entirely the 
same : the coast and river tracts are tropical bush-lands, in 
which sheep-farming is impossible, and in which sugar, cot- 
ton, and spices alone can be made to pay. To the copper, 
gold, hides, tallow, wool, which have hitherto formed the 
stereotyped list of Australian exports, the Northern colony 
has already added ginger, arrowroot, tobacco, coffee, sugar, 
cotton, cinnamon, and quinine. 

The Queenslanders have not yet solved the problem of the 



KivAL Colonies. 291 

settlement of a tropical country "by Englishmen, and of its 
cultivation by English hands. The future, not of Queens- 
land merely, but of Mexico, of Ceylon, of every tropical coun- 
try of our race, of free government itself, are all at stake ; 
but the success of the experiment that has been tried be- 
tween Brisbane and Rockampton has not been great. The 
colony, indeed, has prospered much, quadrupling its popula- 
tion and trebling its exports and revenue in six years ; but 
it is the Darling Downs, and other table-land sheep-countries, 
or, on the other hand, the Northern gold-fields, which are the 
main cause of the prosperity ; and in the sugar and cotton 
culture of the coast, colored labor is now almost exclusively 
employed, with the usual effect of degrading field-work in 
the eyes of European settlers, and of forcing upon the coun- 
try a form of society of the aristocratic type. 

It is possible that just as New England has of late forbid- 
den to Louisiana the importation of Chinamen to work her 
sugar-fields, just as the Kansas radicals have declared that 
they will not recognize the Bombay Hammal as a brother, 
just as the Victorians have refused to allow the further re- 
ception of convicts by West Australia, separated from their 
territories by 1000 miles of desert, so the New South Welsh 
and Victorians combined may at least protest against the 
introduction of a mixed multitude of Bengalees, Chinamen, 
South Sea Islanders, and Malays to cultivate the Queensland 
coast plantations. If, however, the other colonies permit 
their Northern sister to continue in her course of import- 
ing dark-skinned laborers, to form a peon population, a few 
years will see her a wealthy cotton and sugar-growing coun- 
try, with all the vices of a slave-holding government, though 
without the name of slavery. The planters of the coast and 
villages, united with the squatters of the table-lands or 
"Downs," will govern Queensland, and render union with 
the free colonies impossible, unless great gold discoveries 
take place, and save the country to Australia. 

Were it not for the pride of race that everywhere shows 
itself in the acts of English settlers, there might be a bright 
side to the political future of the Queensland colony. The 
colored laborers at present introduced — industrious Tongans 
and active Hill-coolies from Hindostan, laborious, sober, and 



292 Greater Britain. 

free from superstition — should not only be able to advance 
the commercial fortunes of Queensland as they have those of 
the Mauritius, but eventually to take an equal share in free 
government with their white employers. To avoid the gi- 
gantic evil of the degradation of hand labor, which has ruin- 
ed morally as well as economically the Southern States of 
the American republic, the Indian, Malay, and Chinese la- 
borers should be tempted to become members of land-hold- 
ing associations. A large spice and sugar-growing popula- 
tion in Northern Queensland would require a vast agricult- 
ural population in the south to feed it ; and the two colo- 
nies, hitherto rivals, might grow up as sister countries, each 
depending upon the other for the supply of half its needs. 
It is, however, worthy of notice that the agreements of the 
Queensland planters with the imported dark-skinned field- 
hands provide only for the payment of wages in goods, at the 
rates of 65. to IO5. a month. The "goods" consist of pipes, 
tobacco, knives, and beads. Judging from the experience of 
California and Ceylon, there can be little hope of the general 
admission of colored men to equal rights by English settlers ; 
and the Pacific islands ofier so tempting a field to kidnap- 
ping skippers that there is much fear that Queensland may 
come to show us not merely semi-slavery, but peonage of that 
worst of kinds, in which it is cheaper to work the laborer to 
death than to " breed " him. 

Such is the present rapidity of the growth and rise to 
power of tropical Queensland, such the apparent poverty of 
l^ew South Wales, that were the question merely one be- 
tween the Sydney wheat-growers and the cotton-planters of 
Brisbane and Rockampton, the sub-tropical settlers would 
be as certain of the foremost position in any future confeder- 
ation, as they were in America when the struggle lay only 
between the Carolinas and New England. As it is, just as 
America was first saved by the coal of Pennsylvania and 
Ohio, Australia will be saved by the coal of New South 
Wales. Queensland possesses some small stores of coal, but 
the vast preponderance of acreage of the great power of the 
fiiture lies in New South Wales. 

On my return from a short voyage to the north, I visited 
the coal-field of New South Wales at Newcastle, on the Hunt- 



KivAL Colonies. 293 

er. The beds are of vast extent ; they lie upon the banks of a 
navigable river, and so near to the surface that the best quali- 
ties are raised, in a country of dear labor, at 85. or 95. the 
ton, and delivered onboard ship for 12s. For manufacturing 
purposes the coal is perfect ; for steam-ship use it is, though 
somewhat " dirty," a serviceable fuel ; and copper and iron 
are found in close pi;j>ximity to the beds. The N'ewcastle 
•and Port Jackson fields open a singularly brilliant future to 
Sydney in these times, when coal is king in a far higher de- 
gree than was ever cotton. To her black beds the colony 
will owe not only manufactures, bringing wealth and popu- 
lation, but that leisure which is begotten of riches — leisure 
that brings culture, and love of harmony and truth. 

Manufactories are already springing up in the neighbor- 
hood of Sydney, adding to the whirl and bustle of the town, 
and adding, too, to its enormous population, already dispro- 
portionate to that of the colony in which it stands. As the 
depot for much of the trade of Queensland and I^ew Zealand, 
and as the metropolis of pleasure to which the wealthy 
squatters pour from all parts of Australia, to spend rapidly 
enough their hard-won money, Sydney would in any case 
have been a populous city ; but the barrenness of the coun- 
try in which it stands has, until the recent opening of the 
railroads, tended still further to increase its size, by failing 
to tempt into the country the European immigrants. The 
Irish in Sydney form a third of the population, yet hardly 
one of these men but meant to settle upg^ land when he left 
his native island. 

In France there is a tendency to migrate to Paris, in Aus- 
tria, a continual drain toward Vienna, in England, toward 
London. A corresponding tendency is observable through- 
out Australia and America. Immigrants hang about "New 
York, Philadelphia, Boston, Sydney, Melbourne ; and, find- 
ing that they can scrape a living in these large cities with 
toil somewhat less severe than that which would be needed 
to procure them a decent livelihood in the bush, the unthrifty 
as well as the dissipated throng together in densely-popu- 
lated " rookeries " in these cities, and render the first quar- 
ter of New York and the so-called " Chinese " quarter of 
Melbourne an insult to the civilization of the world. 



294 Greater Britain. 

In the case of Australia this concentration of population 
is becoming more remarkable day by day. Even under the 
system of free selection, by which the Legislature has at- 
tempted to encourage agricultural settlement, the moment a 
free selector can make a little money he comes to one of the 
capitals to spend it. Sydney is the city of pleasure, to 
which the wealthy Queensland squ^ters resort to spend 
their money, returning to the north for fresh supplies onlji. 
when they can not afford another day of dissipation, while 
Melbourne receives the outpour of Tasmania. 

The rushing to great cities the moment there is money 
to be spent, characteristic of the settlers in all these colonies, 
is much to be regretted, and presents a sad contrast to the 
quiet stay-at-home habits of American farmers. Every thing 
here is fever and excitement — as in some systems of geome- 
try motion is the primary, rest the derived idea. New South 
Welshmen tell you that this unquiet is peculiar to Victoria ; 
to a new-comer it seems as rife in Sydney as in Melbourne. 

Judging from the Colonial Government reports, which 
immigrants are conjured by the inspectors to procure and 
read, and which are printed in a cheap form for the j)urpose, 
the New South Welsh can hardly wish to lure settlers into 
" the bush ;" for in one of these documents, published while 
I was in Sydney, the curator of the Museum reported that in 
his explorations he never went more than twelve miles from 
the city, but that within that circuit he found seventeen dis- 
tinct species of laq^-snakes, two of sea-snakes, thirty of liz- 
ards, and sixteen of frogs — seventy-eight species of reptiles 
rewarded him in all. The seventeen species of land-snakes 
found by him within the suburbs were named by the curator 
in a printed list ; it commenced with the pale-headed snake, 
and ended with the death-adder. 



CHAPTER m. 

• VICTOEIA. 

The smallest of our southern colonies except Tasmania — 
one-fourth the size of New South Wales, one-eighth of Queens- 
land, one-twelfth of West Australia, one-fifteenth of South 




BUSH SOENEBT. 




COLLIN'S STKEET-EAST ; MELBOURNE. 



296 Greater Britain. 

Australia — Victoria is the wealthiest of the Australian na- 
tions, and, India alone excepted, has the largest trade of any 
of the dependencies of Great Britain. 

When Mr. Fawkner's party landed in 1835 upon the Yarra 
banks, mooring their boat to the forest-trees, they formed a 
settlement upon a grassy hill behind a marsh, and began to 
pasture sheep where Melbourne, the capital, now stands. In 
twenty years Melbourne became the largest city but one in 
the southern hemisphere, having 150,000 people within her 
limits or those of the suburban towns. Victoria has grand- 
er public buildings in her capital, larger and more costly 
railroads, a greater income, and a heavier debt than any 
other colony, and she pays to her governor £10,000 a year, 
or one-fourth more than even N"ew South Wales. 

When looked into, all this success means gold. There is 
industry, there is energy, there is talent, there is generosity 
and public spirit, but they are the abilities and virtues that 
gold will bring, in bringing a rush from all the world of dash- 
ing fellows in the prime of life. The progress of Melbourne 
is that of San Francisco; it is the success of Hokitika on a 
larger scale, and refined and steadied by having lasted through 
some years — the triumph of a population which has hitherto 
consisted chiefly of adult males. 

Sydney people, in their jealousy of the Victorians, refuse 
to admit even that the superior energy of the Melbourne 
men is a necessary consequence of then- having been the pick 
of the spirited youths of all the world, brought together by 
the rush for gold. At the time of the first "find" in 1851 
all the resolute, able, physically strong do-naughts of Europe 
and America flocked into Port Philip, as Victoria was then 
called ; and such timid and weak men as came along with 
them being soon crowded out, the men of energy and tough 
vital force alone remained. 

Some of the Kew South Welsh, shutting their eyifs to the 
facts connected with the gold-rush, a'ssert so loudly that the 
Victorians are the refuse of California, or " Yankee scum," 
that when I first landed in Melbourae I expected to find 
street-cars, revolvers, big hotels, and fire-clubs, euchre, cau- 
cuses, and mixed drinks. I could discover nothing American 
about Melbourne except the grandeur of the public buildings 



Victoria. 297 

and the width of the streets, and its people are far more 
thoroughly British than are the citizens of the rival capital. 
In many senses Melbourne is the London, Sydney the Paris 
of Australia. 

Of the surpassing vigor of the Victorians there can be no 
doubt; a glance at the map shows the Victorian railways 
stretching to the Murray, while those of New South Wales 
are still boggling at the Green Hills, fifty miles from Sydney. 
Melbourne, the more distant port, has carried off the Austra- 
lian trade with the New Zealand gold-fields from Sydney, 
the nearer port. Melbourne imports Sydney shale, and makes 
from it mineral oil before the Sydney people have found out 
its value ; and gas in Melbourne is cheaper than in Sydney, 
though the Victorians are bringing their coal five hundred 
miles, from a spot only fifty miles from Sydney. 

It is possible that the secret of the superior energy of the 
Victorians may lie, not in the fact that they are more Ameri- 
can, but more English, than the New South Welsh. The 
leading Sydney people are mainly the sons or grandsons of 
original settlers — " cornstalks " reared in the semi-tropical 
climate of the coast ; the Victorians are full-blooded English 
immigrants, bred in the more rugged climes of Tasmania, 
Canada, or Great Britain, and brought only in their maturity 
to live in the exhilarating air of Melbourne, the finest climate 
in the world for healthy men : Melbourne is hotter than Syd- 
ney, but its climate is never tropicaL The squatters on the 
Queensland Downs, mostly immigrants from England, show 
the same strong vitality that the Melbourne men possess ; 
but their brother-immigrants in Brisbane — the Queensland 
capital, where the languid breeze resembles that of Sydney 
— are as incapable of prolonged exertion as are the " corn- 
stalks." 

Whatever may be the causes of the present triumph of 
Melbourne over Sydney, the inhabitants of the latter city 
are far from accepting it as likely to be permanent. They 
can not but admit the present glory of what they call the 
" Mushroom City." The magnificent pile of the new Post- 
ofiice, the gigantic Treasury (which, when finished, will be 
larger than our own in London), the University, the Parlia- 
ment-house, the Union and Melbourne Clubs, the City Hall, 

N2 



298 Greater Britain. 

the Wool Exchange, the viaducts upon the Government rail- 
road lines — all are Cyclopean in their architecture, all seem 
built as if to last forever ; still, they say that there is a cer- 
tain want of permanence about the prosperity of Victoria. 
When the gold discovery took place in 1851, such a trade 
sprang up that the imports of the colony jumped from one 
million to twenty-five million sterling in three years ; but al- 
though she is now commencing to ship breadstuffs to Great 
Britain, exports and imports alike show a steady decrease. 
Considerably more than half of the hand-workers of the col- 
ony are still engaged in gold-mining, and nearly half the pop- 
ulation is resident upon the gold-fields ; yet the yield shows, 
year by year, a continual decline. Had it not been for the 
discoveries in New Zealand, which have carried off the float- 
ing digger population, and for the wise discouragement by 
the democrats of the monopolization of the land, there would 
have been distress upon the gold-fields during the last few 
years. The Victorian population is already nearly stationary, 
and the squatters call loudly for assisted immigration and free 
trade, but the stranger sees nothing- to astonish him in the 
temporary stagnation that attends a decreasing gold pro- 
duction. 

The exact economical position that Victoria occupies is 
easily ascertained, for her statistics are the most perfect in 
the world; the arrangement is a piece of exquisite mosaic. 
The brilliant statistician who fills the post of registrar-gen- 
eral to the colony had the immense advantage of starting 
clear of all tradition, unhampered and unclogged ; and, as the 
Governments of the other colonies have the last few years 
taken Victoria for model, a gradual approach is being made 
to uniformity of system. It was not too soon, for British 
colonial statistics are apt to be confusing. I have seen a list 
of imports in which one class consisted of ale, aniseed, arsenic, 
asafoetida, and astronomical instruments ; boots, bullion, and 
salt butter ; capers, cards, caraway seed ; gauze, gin, glue, 
and gloves ; maps and manure ; philosophical instruments 
and salt pork ; sandal-wood, sarsaparilla, and smoked sausages. 
Alphabetical arrangement has charms for the official mind. 

Statistics are generally considered dull enough, but thi 
statistics of these young countries are figure-poems. Tables 



ViCTOEIA. 299 

that in England contrast jute with hemp, or this man with 
that man, here compare the profits of manufactures with those 
of agriculture, or pit against each other the powers of race 
and race. 

Victoria is the only country in existence which possesses 
a statistical history from its earliest birth ; but, after all, even 
Victoria falls short of Minnesota, where the settlers founded 
the " State Historical Society " a week before the foundation 
of the State. 

Gold, wheat, and sheep are the three great staples of Vic- 
toria, and have each its party, political and commercial — dig- 
gers, agricultural settlers, and squatters — though of late the 
diggers and the landed democracy have made common cause 
against the squatters. Gold can now be studied best at 
Ballarat, and wheat at Clunes, or upon the Barrabool hills 
behind Geelong; but I started first for Echuca, the head- 
quarters of the squatter interest and metropolis of sheep, 
taking upon my way Kyneton, one of the richest agricultur- 
al districts of the colony, and also the once-famous gold-dig- 
gings of Bendigo Creek. 

Between Melbourne and Kyneton, where I made' my first 
halt, the railway runs through undulating, lightly-timbered 
tracts, free from underwood, and well grassed. By letting 
my eyes persuade me that the burnt-up herbage was a ri- 
pening crop of wheat or oats, I found a likeness to the views 
in the weald of Sussex, though the foliage of the gums, or 
eucalypti, is thinner than that of the English oaks. 

Riding from Kyneton to Carlsruhe, Pastoria, and the foot- 
hills of the " Dividing Range," I found the agricultural com- 
munity busily engaged on the harvest, and much excited upon 
the great thistle question. Women and tiny children were 
working in the fields, while the men were at Kyneton, trying 
in vain to hire harvest-hands from Melbourne at less than 
£2 10s. or £3 a week and board. The thistle question was 
not less serious: the "thistle inspectors," elected under the 
" Thistle Prevention Act," had commenced their labors ; and 
although each man agreed with his friend that his neighbor's 
thistles were a nuisance, still he did not like being fined for 
not weeding out his own. The fault, they say, lies in the cli- 
mate ; it is too good, and the English weeds have thriven. 



800 Greater Britain. 

Great as was the talk of thistles, the fields in the fertile Kyne- 
ton district were as clean as in a well-kept English farm, and 
showed the clearest signs of the small farmer's personal care. 

Every one of the agricultural villages that I visited was a 
full-grown municipality. The colonial English, freed from the 
checks which are put by interested landlords to local gov- 
ernment in Britain, have passed in all the settlements laws 
under which any village must be raised into a municipality 
on fifty of the villagers (the number varies in the different 
colonies) signing a requisition, unless within a given time a 
larger number sign a petition to the contrary effect. 

After a short visit to the bustling digging town of Castle- 
maine I pushed on by train to Sandhurst, a borough of great 
pretensions, which occupies the site of the former digging 
camp at Bendigo. On a level part of the line between the 
two great towns my train dashed through some closed gates, 
happily without hurt. The Melbourne Argus of the next day 
said that the crash had been the result of the signalman tak- 
ing the fancy that the trains should wait on him, not he upon 
the trains, so he had " closed the gates, hoisted the danger 
signal, and adjourned to a neighboring store to drink." On 
my return from Echuca I could not find that he had been dis- 
missed. 

When hands are scarce, and lives valuable not to the pos- 
sessor only but to the whole community, care to avoid acci- 
dents might be expected ; but there is a certain recklessness 
in all young countries, and not even in Kansas is it more ob- 
servable than in Victoria and New South Wales. 

Sandhurst, like Castlemaine, straggles over hill and dale for 
many miles, the diggers preferring to follow the gold-leads, 
and build a suburb by each alluvial mine, rather than draw 
their supplies from the central spot. The extent of the 
worked-out gold-field struck me as greater than in the fields 
round Placerville, but then in California many of the old dig- 
gings are hidden by the vines. 

In Sandhurst I could find none of the magnificent restau- 
rants of Virginia City ; none of the gambling-saloons of Ho- 
kitika ; and the only approach to gayety among the diggers 
was made in a drinking-hall, where some dozen red-shirted, 
bearded men were dancing by turns with four well-behaved 



Victoria. 301 

and quiet-looking German girls, who were paid, the constable 
at the gate informed me, by the proprietor of the booth. My 
hotel — " The Shamrock " — kept by New York Irish, was a 
thoroughly American house ; but then digger civilization is 
everywhere American — a fact owing, no doubt, to the Ameri- 
can element having been predominant in the first-discovered 
diggings — those of California. 

Digger revolts must have been feared when the Sandhurst 
Government Reserve was surrounded with a ditch strangely 
like a moat, and palings that bear an ominous resemblance to 
a Maori pah. In the morning I found my way through the 
obstructions, and discovered the police-station, and in it the 
resident magistrate, to whom I had a letter. He knew noth- 
ing of " Gumption Dick," Hank Monk's friend, but he intro- 
duced me to his intelligent Chinese clerk, and told me many 
things about the yellow diggers. The bad feeling between 
the English diggers and the Chinese has not in the least died 
away. Upon the worked-out fields of Castlemaine and Sand- 
hurst the latter do what they please, and I saw hundreds of 
them washing quietly and quickly in the old Bendigo Creek, 
finding an ample living in the leavings of the whites; So 
successful have they been that a few Europeans, have lately 
been taking to their plan ; and an old Frenchman who died 
here lately, and who, from his working persistently in worn- 
out fields, had always been thought to be a harmless idiot, 
left behind him twenty thousand pounds, obtained by wash- 
ing in company with the Chinese. 

The spirit that called into- existence the Ballarat anti- 
Chinese mobs is not extinct in Queensland, as I found during 
my stay at Sydney. At the Crocodile Creek diggings in 
Korthern Queensland, whither many of the Chinese from 
N'ew South Wales have lately gone, terrible riots occurred 
the week after I landed in Australia. The English diggers 
announced their intention of " rolling up " the Chinese, and 
proceeded to "jump their claims" — that is, trespass on the 
mining-plots, for in Queensland the Chinese have felt them- 
selves strong enough to purchase claims. The Chinese bore 
the robbery for some days, but at last a digger who had sold 
them a claim for £50 one morning, hammered the pegs into 
the soft ground the same day, and then " jumped the claim " 



802 Greater Britain. 

on the pretense that it was not " pegged out." This was 
too rai:ich for the Chinese owner, who tomahawked the dig- 
ger on the spot. The English at once fired the Chinese 
town, and even attacked the English driver of a coach for 
conveying Chinamen on his vehicle. Some diggers in North 
Queensland are said to have kept bloodhounds for the pur- 
pose of hunting Chinamen for sport, as the rowdies of the 
Old Country hunt cats with terriers. 

On the older gold-fields, such as those of Sandhurst and 
Castlemaine, the hatred of the English for the Chinese lies 
dormant, but it is not the less strong for being free from 
physical violence. The woman in a baker's shop near Sand- 
hurst, into which I went to buy a roll for lunch, shuddered 
when she told me of one or two recent marriages between 
Irish " Biddies " and some of the wealthiest Chinese. 

The man against whom all this hatred and suspicion is di- 
rected is no ill-conducted rogue or villain. The chief of the 
police at Sandhurst said that the Chinese were " the best of 
citizens ;" a member of the Victorian Parliament, resident on 
the very edge of their quarter at Geelong, spoke of the yel- 
low men to me as " well-behaved and frugal ;" the registrar- 
general told me that there is less crime, great or small, 
among the Chinese than among any equal number of En- 
glish in the colony. 

The Chinese are not denied civil rights in Victoria, as 
they have been in California. Their testimony is accepted 
in the courts against that of whites ; they may become nat- 
uralized, and then can vote. Some twenty or thirty of them, 
out of 30,000, have been naturalized in Victoria up to the 
present time. 

That the Chinese in Australia look upon their stay in the 
gold-fields as merely temporary is clear from the character 
of their restaurants, which are singularly inferior to those of 
San Francisco. The best in the colonies is one near Castle- 
maine, but even this is small and poor. Shark's fin is an un- 
heard-of luxury, and even puppy you would have to order. 
" Silk-worms fried in castor-oil " is the colonial idea of a 
Chinese delicacy; yet the famous sea-slug is an inhabitant 
of Queensland waters and the Gulf of Carpentaria. 

From Sandhurst northward the covmtry, known as Elysium 



Victoria. 303 

Flats, becomes level, and is wooded in patches, like the " oak- 
opening " prairies of Wisconsin and Illinois. Within fifty- 
miles of Echuca the line comes out of the forest on to a vast 
prairie, on which was a marvellous mirage of water and trees 
at various step-like levels. From the other window of the 
compartment carriage (sadly hot and airless after the Amer- 
ican cars) I saw the thin, dry, yellow grass on fire for a 
dozen miles. The smoke from these " bush-fires " sometimes 
extends for hundreds of miles to sea. In steaming down 
from Sydney to Wilson's Promontory on my way to Mel- 
bourne, we passed through a column of smoke about a mile 
in width when off Wolongong, near Botany Bay, and never 
lost sight of it, as it lay in a dense brown mass upon the sea, 
until we rounded Cape Howe, two hundred miles farther to 
the southward. 

The fires on these great plains are caused by the dropping 
of fusees by travellers as they ride along smoking their pipes, 
Australian fashion, or else by the spreading of the fires from 
their camps. The most ingenious stories are invented by the 
colonists to prevent us from throwing doubt upon their care- 
fulness ; and I was told at Echuca that the late fires had been 
caused by the concentration of the sun's rays upon spots of 
grass owing to the accidental conversion into burning-glasses 
of beer-bottles that had been suffered to lie about. What- 
ever their cause, the fires, in conjunction with the heat, have 
made agricultural settlement upon the Murray a lottery. 
The week before my visit some ripe oats at Echuca had been 
cut down to stubble by the hot wind, and farmers are said 
to count upon the success of only one harvest in every three 
seasons. On the other hand, the Victorian apricots, shrivelled 
by the hot wind, are so many lumps of crystallized nectar 
when you pierce their thick outer coats. 

Defying the sun, I started off to the banks of the Murray 
River, not without some regret at the absence of the continu- 
ous street verandas which in Melbourne form a first step to- 
ward the Italian piazza. One may be deceived by trifles 
when the character of an unknown region is at stake. Be- 
fore reaching the country, I had read " Steam-packet Hotel, 
Esplanade, Echuca ;" and, though experiences on the Ohio 
had taught me to put no trust in " packets and hotels," yet. 



301 Greater Britain. 

I had somehow come to the belief that the Murray must be 
a second Missouri at least, if not a Mississippi. The " espla- 
nade " I found to be a myth, and the " fleet " . of " steam- 
packets " was drawn up in a long line upon the mud, there 
beins: in this summer weather no water in which it could 



float. The Murray in February is a streamless ditch, which 
in America, if known and named at all, would rank as a tenth- 
rate river. 

The St. Lawi'ence is 2200 miles in length, and its tributa- 
ry, the Ottawa, 1000 miles in length, itself receives a tributa- 
ry stream, the Gatineau, with a course of 420 miles. At 217 
miles from its confluence with the Ottawa the Gatineau is 
still 1000 feet in width. At Albury, which even in winter is 
the head of navigation on the Murray, you are only some 600 
or YOO miles by river from the open sea, or about the same 
distance as from Memphis in Tennessee to the mouth of the 
Mississippi. 

During six months of the year, however, the Murray is for 
wool-carrying purposes an important river. The railway to 
Echuca has tapped the river sy stein in the Victorians' favor, 
and Melbourne has become the port of the back country of 
New South Wales, and even Queensland. " The Riverina is 
commercially annexed " to Victoria, said the premier of New 
South Wales while I was in that colony, and the " Riverina " 
means that portion of New South Wales which lies between 
the Lachlan, the Murrumbidgee, and the Murray, to the north- 
ward of Echuca. 

Returning to the inn to escape the sun, I took up the Hiv- 
erina Herald, published at Echuca ; of its twenty-four col- 
umns, nineteen and a half are occupied by the eternal sheep 
in one shape or another. A representation of Jason's fleece 
stands at the head of the title ; " wool " is the first word in 
the first line of the body of the paper. More than half of the 
advertisements are those of wool-brokers, or else of the fortu- 
nate possessors of specifics that will cure the scab. One dis- 
infectant compound is certified to by no less than seventeen 
inspectors ; another is pufied by a notice informing flock-mas- 
ters that, in cases of foot-rot, the advertiser goes upon the 
principle of " no cure, no pay." One firm makes " liberal ad- 
vances on the ensuing clip ;" another is prepared to do the 



Victoria. 805 

like upon "pastoral securities." Ship-chandlers, regardless 
of associations, advertise in one line their bread and foot-rot 
ointment, their biscuit and sheep-wash solution ; and the last 
of the advertisements upon the front page is that of an 
" agent for the sale of fat." The body of the paper contains 
complaints against the judges at a recent show of wool, and 
an account of the raising of a sawyer " 120 feet in length and 
23 feet in girth " by the new " snag-boat " working to clear 
out the river for the floating down of the next wool-clip. 
Whole columns of small type are filled with " impounding " 
lists, containing brief descriptions of all the strayed cattle of 
each district. The technicalities of the distinctive marks are 
surprising. Who not to the manner born can make much 
of this : " Blue and white cow, cock horns, 22 ofi'-rump, IL off- 
ribs ?" or of this : " Strawberry stag, top off off-ear, J. C. over 
4 off-rump, like H. G. conjoined near loin and rump ?" This, 
again, is difficult : " Swallow tail, off-ear, D reversed and il- 
legible over F off-ribs, PT off-rump." What is a " blue straw- 
berry bull?" is a question which occurred to me. Again, 
what a phenomenon is this : " White cow, writing capital A 
off-shoulder ?" A paragraph relates the burning of " £1 0,000 
worth of country near Gambier," and advertisements of Colt's 
revolvers and quack medicines complete the sheet. The pa- 
per shows that for the most part the colonists here, as in New 
Zealand, have had the wisdom to adopt the poetic native 
names of places, and even to use them for towns, streets, and 
ships. Of the Panama liners, the Rakaia and Maitoura bear 
the names of rivers, the JRuahine and the Kaikoura names of 
mountain ranges ; and the colonial boats have for the most 
part familiar Maori or Australian names ; for instance, JRan- 
gitoto, " hill of hills," and JRangitiria^ " great and good." The 
New Zealand colonists are better off than the Australian in 
this respect : Wongawonga, Yarrayarra, and Wooloomooloo 
are not inviting ; and some of the Australian villages have 
still stranger names. Nindooinbah is a station in Southern 
Queensland ; Yallack-a-yallack, Borongorong, Bunduramon- 
gee, Jabbarabbara, Thuroroolong, Yalla-y-poora, Yanac-a-ya- 
nac, Wuid Kerruick, Woolonguwoong - wrinan, Woori Yal- 
loak, and Borhoneyghurk are stations in Victoria. The only 
leader in the Herald is on the meat question..but there is in 



306 Greater Britain. 

a letter an account of the Christmas festivities at Melbourne, 
which contains much merry-making at the expense of " unac- 
climatized new chums," as fresh-comers to the colonies are 
called. The writer speaks rapturously of the rush on Christ- 
mas Day from the hot, dry, dusty streets to the " golden fields 
of waving corn." The " exposed nature of the Royal Park " 
prevented many excursionists from picnicking there, as they 
had intended ; but we read on, and find that the exposure 
dreaded was not to cold, but to the terrible hot wind which 
swept from the plains of the north-west, and scorched up ev- 
ery blade of grass in the open spots. We hear of Christmas 
dinners eaten upon the grass at Richmond in the sheltered 
shade of the gum-forest, but in the Botanical Gardens the 
" plants had been much afiected by the trying heat." How- 
ever, " the weather on Boxing-day was more favorable for 
open-air enjoyment," as the thermometer was only 98° in the 
shade. 

Will ever New Zealand or Australian bards spring up to 
write of the pale primroses that in September commence to 
peep out from under the melting snows, and to make men 
look forward to the blazing heat and the long December 
days ? Strangely enough, the only English poem which an 
Australian lad can read without laughing at the Old-country 
conceit that connects frost with January and hot weather 
with July, is Thomson's " Seasons," for in its long descrip- 
tions of the changes in England from spring to summer, from 
autumn to winter, a month is only once named : " rosy-foot- 
ed May" can not be said to " steal blushing on" in Australia, 
where May answers to our November. 

In the afternoon I ventured out again, and strolled into 
the gum-forest on the banks of the Campaspe River, not be- 
lieving the reports of the ferocity of the Victorian bunyijDS 
and alligators which have lately scared the squatters who 
dwell on creeks. The black trees, relieved upon a ground 
of white dust and yellow grass, were not inviting, and the 
scorching heat soon taught me to hate the shadeless boughs 
and ragged bark of the inevitable gum. It had not rained 
for nine weeks at the time of my visit, and the thermometer 
stood at 116° in the shade, but there was nothing oppressive 
in the heat ; it seemed only to dry up the juices of the frame. 



Squatter Aristocracy. o07 

and dazzle you with intense brightness. I soon came to agree 
with a newly-landed Irish gardener, who told a friend of 
mind that Australia was a strange country, for he could not 
see that the thermometer had " the slightest effect upon the 
heat." The blaze is healthy, and fevers are unknown m the 
Riverina, decay of noxious matter, animal or vegetable, being 
arrested during summer by the drought. This is a hot year, 
for on the 12th of January the thermometer, even at the Mel- 
bourne Observatory, registered 108° in the shade, and 123° 
in the shade was registered at Wentworth, near the conflu- 
ence of the Murray and the Darling. 

As the afternoon drew on, and, if not the heat, at least the 
sun declined, the bell-birds ceased their tuneful chiming, and 
the forest was vocal only with the ceaseless chirp of the tree- 
cricket, whose note recalled the goat-sucker of our English 
woods. The Australian landscapes show best by the red 
light of the hot-weather sunsets, when the dark feathery foli- 
age of the gum-trees comes out in exquisite relief upon the 
fiery fogs that form the sky, and the yellow earth, gaining a 
tawny hue in the lurid glare, throws off a light resembling 
that which in winter is reflected from our English snows. 
At sunset there was a calm, but as I turned to walk home- 
ward the hot wind sprang up, and died again, while the trees 
sighed themselves uneasily to sleep, as though fearful of the 
morrow's blast. 

A night of heavy heat was followed by a breathless dawn, 
and the scorching sun returned in all its redness to burn up 
once more the earth, not cooled from the glare of yesterday. 
Englishmen must be bribed by enormous gains before they 
will work with continuous toil in such a climate, however 
healthy. 



CHAPTER IV. 

SQUATTER ARISTOCRACY. 

" What is a Colonial Conservative ?" is a question that 
used to be daily put to a Victorian friend of mine when he 
was in London. His answer, he told me, was always, " A 
statesman who has got four of the * points ' of the People's 



308 Greater Britain. 

Charter, and wants to consei've them ;" but as used in Yicto- 
ria, the term " Conservative " expresses the feeling less of a 
political party than of the whole of the people who have any- 
thing whatever to lose. Those who have something object 
to giving a share in the Government to those who have 
nothing ; those who have much object to political equality 
with those who have less ; and, not content with having won 
a tremendous victory in basing the Upper House upon a 
£5000 qualification and £100 freehold or £300 leasehold 
franchise, the plutocracy are meditating attacks upon the 
Legislative Assembly. 

The democracy hold out undauntedly, refusing all mone- 
tary tests, though an intelligence basis for the franchise is by 
no means out of favor, except with the few who can not read 
or write. One day, when I was driving from Melbourne to 
Sandridge in company with a colonial merchant, he asked 
our car-driver : " N^ow, tell me fairly : do you think these 
rogues of fellows that hang about the shore here ought to 
have votes ?" " No, I don't." " Ah ! you'd like to see a 5s. 
fee on registration, wouldn't you.?" The answer was sharp 
enough in its tone. "Five shillings would be nothing to 
you ; it would be something to me, and it would be more 
than my brother could pay. What I'd do would be to say 
that those who couldn't read shouldn't vote — that's all. 
That would keep out the loafers." 

The plutocratic party is losing, not gaining, ground m 
Victoria; it is far more likely that the present generation 
will see the "LTpper House abolished than that it will witness 
the introduction of restrictions upon the manhood suffrage 
■which exists for the Lower ; but there is one branch of the 
plutocracy which actively carries on the fight in all the colo- 
nies, and which claims to control society — the pastoral ten- 
ants of Crown lands, or Squatter Aristocracy. 

The word " squatter " has undergone a remarkable change 
of meaning since the time when it denoted those who stole 
Government land, and built their dwellings on it. As late 
as 1837 squatters were defined by the Chief-justice of New 
South Wales as people occupying lands without legal title, 
and subject to a fine on discovery. They were described as 
living by bartering rum with convicts for stolen goods', and 



Squatter Aristocracy. 309 

as being themselves invariably convicts or " expirees." Es- 
caping suddenly from these low associations, the word came 
to be applied to graziers who drove their flocks into the un- 
settled interior, and thence to those of them who received 
leases from the Crown of pastoral lands. 

The squatter is the nabob of Melbourne and Sydney, the 
inexhaustible mine of wealth. He patronizes balls, prome- 
nade concerts, flower-shows ; he is the main-stay of the great 
clubs, the joy of the shop-keepers, the good angel of the ho- 
tels ; without him the opera could not be kept up, and the 
jockey-club would die a natural death. 

Neither squatters nor towns-folk will admit that this view 
of the former's position is correct. The Victorian squat- 
ters tell you that they have been ruined by confiscation, but 
that their neighbors in 'New South Wales, who have leas- 
es, are more prosperous ; in New South Wales they tell you 
of the destruction of the squatters by "free selection," 
of which there is none in Queensland, " the squatter's para- 
dise ;" but in Queensland the squatters protest that they have 
never made wages for their personal work, far less inter- 
est upon their capital. " Not one of us in ten is solvent," is 
their cry. 

As sweeping assertions are made by the towns-folk upon 
the other side. The squatters, they sometimes say, may well 
set up to be a great landed aristocracy, for they have every 
fault of a dominant caste except its generous vices. They 
are accused of piling up vast hoards of wealth while living a 
most penurious life, and contributing less than would so many 
mechanics to the revenue of the country, in order that they 
may return in later life to England, there to spend what they 
have wrung from the soil of Victoria or New South Wales. 

The occupation of the whole of the Crown lands by squat- 
ters has prevented the making of railways to be paid for in 
land, on the American system ; but the chief of all the evils 
connected witjji squatting is the tendency to the accumulation 
in a few hands of all the land and all the pastoral wealth of 
the country, an extreme danger in the face of democratic in- 
stitutions, such as those of Victoria and New South Wales. 
Remembering that manufactures are few, the swelling of the 
cities shows how the people have been kept from the land ; 



310 Greater Britain. 

considerably more than half of the population of Victoria 
lives within the corporate towns. 

A few years back a thousand men held between them, on 
nominal rents, forty million acres out of the forty-three and 
a half million — mountain and swamp excluded — of which 
Victoria consists. It is true that the amount so held has now 
decreased to thirty million, but on the otlier hand the squat- 
ters have bought vast tracts which were formerly within 
their " runs " with the capital acquired in squatting, and, 
knowing the country better than others could know it, have 
selected the most valuable land. 

The colonial democracy in 1860 and the succeeding years 
rose to a sense of its danger from the land monopoly, and be- 
gan to search about for means to put it down, and to destroy 
at the same time the system of holding from the Crown ; for 
it is singular that while in England there seems to be spring- 
ing up a popular movement in favor of the nationalization of 
the land, in the most democratic of the Australian colonies 
the tendency is from Crown-land tenure toward individual 
freehold ownership of the soil. Yet, here in Victoria there 
was a fair field to start upon, for the land already belonged 
to the State — the first of the principles included under the 
phrase nationalized land. In America, again, we see that, 
with the similar advantage of State possession of territories 
which are still fourteen times the size of the French Empire, 
there is little or no tendency toward agitation for the contin- 
uance of State ownership. In short, freehold ownership seems 
dear to the Anglo-Saxon race, while the national land plan 
would commend itself rather to the Celtic races: to the 
Highlander, who remembers clanship, to the Irishman, who 
regrets the Sept. 

Since the Radicals have been in power, both here and in 
New South Wales, they have carried act after act to en- 
courage agricultural settlers on freehold tenure, at the ex- 
pense of the pastoral squatters. The " free selection " plan, 
now in operation in New South Wales, allows the agricultur- 
al settler to buy, but at a fixed price, the freehold of a patch 
of land, provided it be over forty acres and less than 320, 
anywhere he pleases — even in the middle of a squatter's 
" run," if he enters at once^, and commences to cultivate ; and 



Colonial Democracy. 311 

the Land Act of 1862 provides that the squatting license 
system shall entirely end with the year 1869. Forgetting 
that in every lease the Government reserved the power of 
terminating the agreement for the purpose of the sale of 
land, the squatters complain that free selection is but confis- 
cation, and that they are at the mercy of a pack of cattle- 
stealers and horse-thieves, who roam through the country 
haunting their runs like " ghosts," taking up the best land on 
their runs, " picking the eyes out of the land," and turning to 
graze anywhere, on the richest grass, the sheep and cattle 
they have stolen on their way. The best of them, they say, 
are but " cockatoo farmers," living from hand to mouth on 
what they manage to grub and grow. On the other hand, 
the " free selection " principle " up country " is tempered by 
the power of the wealthy squatter to impound the cattle of 
the poor little freeholder whenever he pleases to say that 
they stray on to his " run ;" indeed, " Pound them oflf, or if 
yon can't, buy them ofi"," has become a much-used phrase. 
The squatter, too, is protected in Victoria by such provisions 
as that " improvements " by him, if over £40 on forty acres, 
cover an acre of land for each £1. The squatters are them- 
selves buying largely of land, and thus profiting by the free 
selection. To a stranger it seems as though the interests 
of the squatter have been at least sufficiently cared for, re- 
membering the vital necessity for immediate action. In 
1865 Victoria, smaU as she is, had not sold a tenth of her 
land. 

In her free selectors Victoria will gain a class of citizens 
whose political views will contrast sharply with the strong 
anti-popular sentiments of the squatters, and who, instead of 
spending their lives as absentees, will stay, they and their 
children, upon the land, and spend all they make within the 
colony, while their sons add to its laboring arms. 

Since land has been, even to a limited extent, thrown open, 
Victoria has suddenly ceased to. be a wheat-importing, and 
become a wheat-exporting country ; and flourishing agricult- 
ural communities, such as those of Ceres, Clunes, Kyneton, 
are springing up on every side, growing wheat instead of 
wool, while the wide extension which has in Victoria been 
given to the principle of local self-government in the shape of 



312 Gbeater Britain. 

shire-councils, road-boards, and village-municipalities, allows 
of the union of the whole of the advantages of small and 
great farming, under the unequalled system of small holdings, 
and co-operation for improvements among the holders. 



CHAPTER V. 

COLONIAL DEMOCRACY. 



Pay:JcIENT of members by the State was the great question 
under debate in the Lower House during much of the time 
I spent in Melbourne, and, in spite of all the efforts of the 
Victorian democracy, the bill was lost. The objection taken 
at home that payment degrades the House in the eyes of the 
people could never arise in a new country, where a practical 
nation looks at the salaries as payment for work done, and 
obstinately refuses to believe in the work being done without 
payment in some shape or other. In these colonies the reasons 
in favor of payment are far stronger than they are in Cana- 
da or America ; for while there country or town share equal- 
ly the difficulties of finding representatives who will consent 
to travel hundreds and thousands of miles to Ottawa or 
Washington, in the Australias Parliament sits in towns which 
contain from one-sixth.to one-fourth of the whole population, 
and under a non-payment system power is thrown entirely 
into the hands of Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, Brisbane, Ade- 
laide, and Hobarton. Not only do these cities return none 
but their, own citizens, but the country districts, often unable 
to find within their limits men who have sufficient time and 
money to be able to attend throughout the sessions at the 
capital, elect the city traders to represent them. 

Payment of members was met by a proposition on the 
part of the leader of the squatter party in the Upper House 
to carry it through that assembly if the Lower House would 
introduce the principle of personal representation; but it 
was objected that under such a system the Catholics, who 
form a fifth of the population, might, if they chose, return a 
fifth of the members. That they ought to be able to do so 
never seemed to strike friend or foe. The Catholics, who 



Colonial Democracy. 313 

had a long turn of power under the O'Shaughnessey Govern- 
ment, were finally driven out for appointing none but Irish- 
men to the police. " I always said this ministry would go 
out on the back of a policeman" was the comment of the 
Opposition wit. The present ministry, which is Scotch in 
tone, was hoisted into office by a great coalition against the 
Irish Catholics, of whom there are only a handful in the House. 

The subject of national education, which was before the 
colony during my visit, also brought the Catholics promi- 
nently forward; for an episcopal pastoral was read in all 
their churches, threatening to visit ecclesiastical censure 
upon Catholic teachers in the common schools, and upon the 
parents o/ the children who attend them. " Godless educa- 
tion" is as little popular here as it used to be at home, and 
the Anglican and Catholic clergymen insist that it is pro- 
posed to make their people pay heavily for an education in 
which it would be contrary to their conscience to share ; but 
the laymen seem less distressed than their pastors. It has 
been said that the reason why the Catholic bishop declined 
to be examined before the Education Commission was that 
he was afraid of this question : " Are you aware that half 
the Catholic children in the country are attending schools 
which you condemn?" 

The most singular, perhaps, of the spectacles presented by 
colonial politics during my visit was that of the Victorian 
Upper House going deliberately into committee to consider 
its own constitution, with the view of introducing a bill for 
its own reform, or to meditate, its enemies said, upon self-de- 
struction. Whether the blow comes from within or without, 
there is every probability that the Upper House will shortly 
disappear, and the advice of Milton and Franklin be followed 
in having but a single chamber. It is not unlikely that this 
step Avill be followed by the demand of the Victorians to be 
allowed to choose their own governor, subject to his approv- 
al by the queen, with a view to making it impossible that 
needy men should be sent out to suck the colony, as they 
sometimes have been in the past. The Australians look 
upon the liberal expenditure of a governor as their own 
liberality, but upon meanness on his part as a robbery from 
themselves. 

O 



314 Greater Britain. 

The Victorian have a singular advantage over the Ameri- 
can democrats in being unhampered by a constitution of an- 
tiquity and renown. Constitution-tinkering is here continu- 
al ; the new society is ever re-shaping its political institutions 
to keep pac^ with the latest developments of the national 
mind ; in America, the party of liberty, at this moment en- 
gaged in re-moulding in favor of freedom the worn-out con- 
stitution, dares not even yet declare that the national good 
is its aim, but keeps to the old watch-words, and professes 
to be treading in the footsteps of George Washington. 

The tone of Victorian democracy is not American. There 
is the defiant way of taking care of themselves and ignoring 
their neighbors characteristic of the founders of English 
plantations in all parts of the world — the spirit which 
prompted the passing, in 1852, of the act j)rohibiting the ad- 
mission to the colony of convicts for three years after they 
had received their pardons ; but the English race here is not 
Latinized as it is in America. If it were, Australian democ- 
racy would not be so " shocking " to the squatters. Democ- 
racy, like Mormonism, would be nothing if found among 
Frenchmen or people with black faces, but it is at first sight 
very terrible when it smiles on you from between a pair of 
rosy Yorkshire cheeks. 

The political are not greater than the social differences 
between Australia and America. Australian society resem- 
bles English middle-class society ; the people have, in mat- 
ters of literature and religion, tastes and feelings similar to 
those which pervade such communities as Birmingham or 
Manchester. On the other hand, the vices of America are 
those of aristocracies ; her virtues those of a landed republic. 
Shop and factory are still in the second rank ; wheat and corn 
still the prevailing powers. In all the Australian colonies 
land is coming to the front for the second time under a sys- 
tem of small holdings ; but it is doubtful whether, looking to 
the size of Melbourne, the landed democracy will ever out- 
vote the town-folk in Victoria. 

That men of ability and character are proscribed has been 
one of the charges brought against colonial democracy. For 
my part, I found gathered in Melbourne, at the University, 
at the Observatory, at the Botanical Garden, and at the 



Colonial Demockacy. 315 

Government offices, men of the highest scientific attainments, 
drawn from all parts of the world, and tempted to Australia 
by large salaries voted by the democracy. The statesmen 
of all the colonies are well worthy of the posts they hold. 
Mr. Macalister, in Queensland, and Mr. Martin, at Sydney, 
are excellent debaters. Mr. Parkes, whose biography would 
be the typical history of a successful colonist, and who has 
fought his way up from the position of a Birmingham artisan 
free-emigrant to that of Colonial Secretary of 'New South 
Wales, is an able writer. The business powers of the present 
Colonial Treasurer -of I^ew South Wales are remarkable ; 
and Mr. Higinbotham, the Attorney-general of Victoria, 
possesses a fund of experience and a power of foresight which 
it would be hard to equal at home. Many of the ministers 
in all the colonies are men who have worked themselves up 
from the ranks, and it is amusing to notice the affected hor- 
ror with w^hich their antecedents are recalled by those who 
have brought out a pedigree from the Old Country. A Gov- 
ernment clerk in one of the colonies told me that the three 
last ministers at the head of his department had been " so 
low in the social scale that my wife could not visit theirs." 

Class animosity runs much higher, and drives its roots 
far deeper into private life in Victoria than in any other 
English-speaking country I have seen. Political men of dis- 
tinction are shunned by their opponents in the streets and 
clubs ; and, instead of its being possible to differ on politics 
and yet continue friends, as in tl\e Old Country, I have seen 
men in Victoria refuse to sit down to dinner with a states- 
man from whose views on land questions they happened to 
dissent. A man once warned me solemnly against dining 
^l^th a quiet grave old gentleman, on the ground that he 
was " a most dangerous Radical — a perfect firebrand." 

Treated in this way, it is not strange that the democratic 
ministers and members stand much upon their dignity, and 
Colonial Parliaments are not only as haughty as the parent 
assembly at Westminster, but often inclined to assert their 
privileges by the most arbitrary of means. A few weeks be- 
fore I arrived in Melbourne a member of the staff of the 
Argus newspaper was given up by the proprietors to soothe 
the infuriated Assembly. Having got him, the great ques- 



316 ^ Greater Britain. 

tion of what to do with him. arose, and he was placed in a 
vault with a grated window, originally built for prisoners of 
the House, but which had been temporarily made use of as 
a coal-hole. Such a disturbance was provoked by the al- 
leged barbarity of this proceeding that the prisoner was 
taken to a capital room up stairs, where he gave dinner- 
parties every day. His opponents said the great difficulty 
was to get rid of him, for he seemed to be permanently loca- 
ted in the Parliament-house, and that, when they ordered his 
liberation, his friends insisted that it should not take place 
until he had been carried down to the coal-hole cell which he 
had occupied the first day, and there photographed " through 
the dungeon bars " as the " martyr of the Assembly." 

Though both Victoria and New South Wales are demo- 
cratic, there is a great difference between the two democra- 
cies. In New South Wales I found not a democratic so much 
as a mixed country, containing a large and wealthy class 
with aristocratic prejudices, but governed by an intensely 
democratic majority — a country not unlike the State of 
Maryland. On the other hand, the interest which attaches 
to the political condition of Victoria is extreme, since it 
probably presents an accurate view, " in little," of the state 
of society which will exist in England, after many steps to- 
ward social democracy have been taken, but before the na- 
tion as a whole has become completely democratic. 

One of the best features of the colonial democracy is its 
earnestness in the cause of education. In England it is one 
of our worst national peculiarities that, whatever our sta- 
tion, we either are content with giving children an " educa- 
tion " which is absolutely wanting in any real training for 
the mind or aid to the brain in its development, or else i^e 
give them a schooling which is a mere preparation for the 
Bar or Church, for it has always been considered with us 
that it is a far greater matter to be a solicitor or a curate than 
to be wise or happy. This is, of course, a consequence part- 
ly of the energy of the race, and partly of our aristocratic 
form of society, whicK leads every member of a class to be 
continually trying to get into the class immediately above 
it in wealth or standing. In the colonies, as in the United 
States, the democratic form which society has taken has car- 



Colonial Democracy, 817 

ried with it the continental habit of thought upon education- 
al matters, so that it would seem as though the form of so- 
ciety influenced this question much more than the energy of 
the race, which is rather heightened than depressed in the§e 
new countries. The English Englishman says, " If I send 
Dick to a good school, and scrape up money enough to put 
him into a profession, even if he don't make much, at least 
he'll be a gentleman." The Australian or democratic En- 
glishman says, " Tom must have good schooling, and must 
make the most of it ; but I'll not have him knocking about 
in broadcloth, and earning nothing ; so no profession for 
him ; but let him make money like me, and mayhap get a 
few acres more land." 

Making allowance for the thinness of population in the 
bush, education in Victoria is extremely general among the 
children, and is directed by local committees with success, 
although the members of the boards are often themselves 
destitute of all knowledge except that which tells them that 
education will do their children good. Mr. Geary, an in- 
spector of schools, told the commissioners that he had ex- 
amined one school where not a single member of the local 
committee could write ; but these immigrant fathers do 
their duty honestly toward the children for all their igno- 
rance, and there is every chance that the schools will grow 
and grow until their influence on behalf of freedom becomes 
as marked in Victoria as it ever has been in Massachusetts. 
Education has a great advantage in countries where political 
rights are widely extended : in the colonies, as in America, 
there is a spirit of political life astir throughout the country, 
and newspapers and public meetings continue an education 
throughout life which in England ceases at twelve, and gives 
place to driving sheep to paddocks, and shouting at rooks 
in a wheat-field. 

There is nothing in the state of the Victorian schools to 
show what will be the type of the next generation, but there 
are many reasons for believing that the present disorganiza- 
tion of colonial society will only cease with tlinl^ attainment 
of complete democracy or absolute equality of conditions, 
which must be produced by the already democratic institu- 
tions in a little more than a generation. The squatter class 



818 Greatee Britain. 

will disappear as agriculture drives sheep-farming from the 
field, and, on the other hand, the town democracy will adopt 
a tone of manly independence, instead of one of brag and 
bluster, when education makes them that which at present 
they are not — the equals of the wealthy farmers. 

It has been justly pointed out that one of the worst dan- 
gers of democracy is the crushing influence of public opinion 
upon individuality, and many who have written upon Ameri- 
ca have assumed that the tendency has already shown it- 
self there. I had during my stay in the United States ar- 
rived at the contrary opinion, and come to believe that in 
no country in the world is eccentricity, moral and religious, 
so .ripe as in America, in no country individuality more 
strong ; but, ascribing to intermixture of foreign blood this 
apparently abnormal departure from the assumed democrat- 
ic shape of society, I looked forward to the prospect of see- 
ing the overwhelming force of the opinion of the majority 
exhibited in all its hideousness in the democratic colonies. 
I was as far from discovering the monster as I had been in 
America, for I soon found that, although there may be little 
intellectual unrest in Australia, there is marvellous variety 
of manners. 

There is in our colonies no trace of that multiplication of 
creeds which characterizes America, and which is said to be 
everywhere the result of the abolition of Establishments. 
In Victoria eighty per cent, of the whites belong to either 
Episcopalians, Catholics, or Presbyterians, and almost all of 
the remainder to the well-known English Churches ; nothing 
is heard of such sects as the hundreds that have sprung up 
in New England — Hopkinsians, Universalists, Osgoodites, 
Rogerenes, Come-outers, Non-resistants, and the like. The 
Australian democrat likes to pray as his father prayed be- 
fore him, and is strongly conservative in his ecclesiastic af- 
fairs. It.may be the absence in Australia of enthusiastic re- 
ligion which accounts for the want among the country-folk 
of the peculiar gentleness of manner which distinguishes the 
farmer in ,|pierica. Climate may have its efiect upon the 
voice ; the influence of the Puritan and Quaker in the early 
history of the thirteen States, when manners were moulded 
and the national life shaped for good or harm, may have per- 



Colonial Democeacy. 319 

manently afiected the descendants of the early settlers ; but 
everywhere in America I noticed that the most perfect dig- 
nity and repose of manner was found in districts where the 
passionate religious systems had their strongest hold. 

There is no trace in the colonies at present of that love 
for general ideas which takes America away from England 
in philosophy, and sets her with the Latin and Celtic races 
on the side of France. The tendency is said to follow on 
democracy, but it would be better said that democracy is 
itself one of these general ideas. Democracy in the colonies 
is at present an accident, and nothing more ; it rests upon 
no basis of reasoning, but upon a fact. The first settlers 
were active, bustling men of fairly even rank of wealth, none 
of whom could brook the leadership of any other. The only 
way out of the difficulty was the adoption of the rule " All 
of us to be equal, and the majority to govern ;" but there 
is no conception of the nature of democracy, as the unfortu- 
nate Chinese have long since discovered. The colonial dem- 
ocrats understand " democracy " as little as the party which 
takes the name in the United States ; but there is at present 
no such party in the colonies as the great Republican party 
of America. 

Democracy can not always remain an accident in Aus- 
tralia : where once planted, it never fails to fix its roots ; but 
even in America its growth has been extremelv slow. There 
is at present in Victoria and [N'ew South Wales a general 
admission among the men of the existence of equality of con- 
ditions, together with a perpetual rebellion on the part of 
their wives to defeat democracy, and to re-introduce the old 
" colonial court " society and resulting class divisions. The 
consequence of this distinction is that the women are mostly 
engaged in elbowing their way; while among their hus- 
bands there is no such thing as the pretending to a style, a 
culture, or a wealth that the pretender does not possess, for 
the reason that no male colonist admits the possibility of the 
existence of a social superior. Like the American " demo- 
crat," the Australian will admit that there may be any num- 
ber of grades below him, so long as you allow that he is at 
the top : but no republican can be stancher in the matter 
of his own equality with the best. 



820 Greater Britain. 

There is no sign that in Australia any more than in Amer- 
ica there will spring up a centre of opposition to the dom- 
inant majority ; but there is as little evidence that the ma- 
jority will even unwittingly abuse its power. It is the fash- 
ion to say that for a State to be intellectually great and no- 
ble there must be within it a nucleus of opposition to the 
dominant principles of the time and place, and that the best 
and noblest minds, the intellects the most seminal, have in- 
variably belonged to men who formed part of such a group. 
It may be doubted whether this assumed necessity for oppo- 
sition to the public will is not characteristic of a^erribly im- 
perfect state of society and government. It is chiefly be- 
cause the world has never had experience of a national life 
at once throbbing with the jDulse of the whole people, and 
completely tolerant not only in law but in opinion of senti- 
ments the most divergent from the views of the majority — 
firm in the pursuit of truths already grasped, but ready to 
seize with avidity upon new ; gifted with a love of order, 
yet prepared to fit itself to shifting circumstances — that men 
continue to look with complacency iipon the enormous waste 
of intellectual power that occurs when a germ of truth such 
as that contained in the doctrines of the Puritans finds de- 
velopment and acceptance only after centuries have passed. 

Australia will start unclogged by slavery to try this ex- 
periment for the world. 



CHAPTER VI. 

PEOTECTIOl^. 

The greatest of all democratic stumbling-blocks is said to 
be Protection. 

" Encourage native industry !'* the colonial shop-keepers 
write up ; " Show your patriotism, and buy colonial goods !" 
is painted in huge letters on a shop-front at Castlemaine. 
In England some unscrupulous traders, we are told, write 
" From Paris " over their English goods, but such dishonesty 
in Victoria takes another shape ; there we have " Warranted 
colonial made " placed over imported wares, for many will 
pay a higher price for a colonial product confessedly not more 



Protection. 821 

than equal to the foreign, such is the rage for Native Indus- 
try, and the hatred of the " Antipodean doctrine of Free 
Trade." 

Many former colonists who live at home persuade them- 
selves, and unfortunately persuade also the public in England, 
that the Protectionists are weak in the colonies. So far is 
this from being the case in either Victoria or New South 
Wales, that in the former colony I found that in the Lower 
House the Free Traders formed but three-elevenths of the 
Assembly, and in New South Wales the pastoral tenants of 
the Crown may be said to stand alone in their support of 
Free Trad^ Some of the squatters go so far as to declare 
that none of the public men of the colonies really believe -in 
the advantages of Protection, but that they dishonestly ac- 
cept the principle, and undertake to act upon it when in of- 
fice, in order to secure the votes of an ignorant majority of 
laborers, who are themselves convinced that Protection means 
high wages. 

It would seem as though we Free Traders had become 
nearly as bigoted in favor of Free Trade as our former op- 
ponents were in favor of Protection. Just as they used to 
say " We are right ; why argue the question ?" so now, in 
face of the support of Protection by all the greatest minds 
in America, all the first statesmen of the Australias, we tell 
the New England and the Australian politicians that we will 
not discuss Protection with them, because there can be no 
two minds about it among men of intelligence and education. 
We will hear no defense of " national lunacy," we say. 

If, putting aside our prejudices, we consent to argue with 
an Australian or American Protectionist, we find ourselves 
in difficulties. All the ordinary arguments against the com- 
pelling people by Act of Parliament to consume a dearer or 
inferior article are admitted as soon as they are urged. If 
you attempt to prove that Protection is bolstered up by those 
whose private interests it subserves, you are shown the shrewd 
Australian diggers and the calculating Western farmers in 
America — men whose pocket interest is wholly opposed to 
Protection, and who yet, almost to a man, support it. A dig- 
ger at Ballarat defended Protection to me in this way : he 
said he knew that under a protective tariff he had to pay 

O 2 



322 Greater Britain. 

dearer than would otherwise be the case for his jacket and 
his moleskin trowsers, but that he preferred to do this, as by 
so doing he aided in building up in the colony such trades 
as the making-up of clothes, in which his brother and other 
men physically too weak to be diggers could gain an honest 
living. In short, the self-denying Protec^on of the Austra- 
lian diggers is of the character of that which would be ac- 
corded to the glaziers of a town by the citizen if they broke 
their windows to find their fellow - townsmen work : " We 
know we lose, but men must live," they say. At the same 
time they deny that the loss will be enduring. Jhe digger 
tells you that he should not mind a continuing pocket loss, 
but that, as a matter of fact, this, which in an old country 
would be pocket loss, in a new country such as his only comes 
to this — that it forms a check on immigration. Wages be- 
ing 5s. a day in Victoria and Ss. a day in England, workmen 
would naturally flock into Victoria from England until wages 
in Melbourne fell to Ss. 6d. or 45. Here comes in prohibition, 
and by increasing the cost of living in Victoria, and cutting 
into the Australian handicraftsman's margin of luxuries, di- 
minishes the temptation to immigration, and consequently 
the influx itself. 

The Western farmers in America, I have heard, defend 
Protection upon far wider grounds : they admit that Free 
Trade would conduce to the most rapid possible peopling of 
their country with foreign immigrants ; but this, they say, is 
an eminently undesirable conclusion. They prefer to pay a 
heavy tax in the increased price of every thing they consume, 
and in the greater cost of labor, rather than see their coun- 
try denationalized by a rush of Irish or Germans, or their 
political institutions endangered by a still further increase 
in the size and power of New York. One old fellow said to 
me, "I don't want the Americans in 1900 to be 200 millions, 
but I Avant them to be happy." 

The American Protectionists point to the danger that 
their countrymen would run unless town kept pace with 
country population. Settlers would pour ofl'to the West, and 
drain the juices of the fertile land by cropping it year after 
year, without fallow, without manure, and then, as the land 
became in a few years exhausted, would have nowhere whith- 



Peotection. 323 

er to turn to find the fertilizers whicli the soil would need. 
Were they to depend upon agriculture alone, they would 
sweep in a wave across the land, leaving behind them a worn- 
out, de]3opulated, jungle-covered soil, open to future settle- 
ment, when its lands should have recovered their fertility, 
by some other and more provident race. The coast-lands of 
most ancient countries are exhausted, densely bushed, and 
uninhabited. In this fact lies the power of our sailor race ; 
crossing the seas, we* occupy the coasts, and step by step 
work our way into the upper country, where we should not 
have attempted to show ourselves had the ancient population 
resisted us upon the shores. In India, in Ceylon, we met the 
hardy race of the highlands and interior only after we had 
already fixed ourselves upon the coast, with a safe basis for 
our supply. The fate that these countries have met is that 
which colonists expect to be their own, unless the protective 
system be carried put in its entirety. In like manner the 
Americans point to the ruin of Virginia, and if you urge 
" Slavery," answer, " Slavery is but agriculture." 

Those who* speak of the selfishness of the Protectionists as 
a whole can never have taken the trouble to examine into 
the arguments by which Protection is supported in Australia 
and America. In these countries Protection is no mere na- 
tional delusion; it is a system deliberately adopted with 
open eyes as one conducive to the country's welfare, in spite 
of objections known to all, in spite of pocket losses that come 
home to all. If it be, as we in England believe, a folly, it is 
at all events a sublime one, full of self-sacrifice, illustrative 
of a certain nobility in the national heart. The Australian 
diggers and Western farmers in America are setting a grand 
example to the world of self-sacrifice for a national object ; 
hundreds and thousands of rough men are content to live — 
they and their families — upon less than they might other- 
wise enjoy, in order that the condition of the mass of their 
countrymen may continue raised above that of their brother 
toilers in Old England. Their, manufactures are beginning 
now to stand alone, but hitherto, without Protection, the 
Americans would have had no cities but sea-ports. By pict- 
uring to ourselves England dependent upon the city of Lon- 
don, upon Liverpool, and Hull, and Bristol, we shall see the 



824 Greater Britain, 

necessity the Western men are now under of setting off Pitts- 
burg against New York and Philadelphia. In short, the 
tendency, according to the Western farmers, of Free Trade, 
in the early stages of a country's existence, is to promote 
universal centralization, to destroy local centres and the 
commerce they create, to so tax the farmer with the cost of 
transport to distant markets that he must grow wheat and 
corn continuously, and can not but exhaust his soil. With 
markets so distant, the richest forest-lands are not worth 
clearing, and settlement sweeps over the country, occupying 
the poorer lands, and then abandoning them once more. 

Protection in the colonies and America is to a great de- 
gree a revolt against steam. Steam is making the world all 
one ; steam " corrects " differences in the price of labor. 
When steam brings all races into competition with each 
other the cheaper races will extinguish the dearer, till at last 
some one people will inhabit the whole earth. Coal remains 
the only power, as it will probably always be cheaper to 
carry the manufactured goods than to carry the coal. 

Time after time I have heard the Western farmers draw 
imaginary pictures of the state of America if Free Trade 
should gain the day, and ask of what avail it is to say that 
Free Trade and free circulation of people are profitable to 
the pocket, if they destroy the national existence of America ; 
what good to point out the gain of weight to their purses, 
in the face of the destruction of their religion, their language, 
and their Saxon institutions. 

One of the greatest of the thinkers of America defended 
Protection to me on the following grounds : That without 
Protection America could at present have but few and limit- 
ed manufactures. That a nation can not properly be said to 
exist as such unless she has manufactures of many kinds ; 
for men are born, some with a turn to agriculture, some with 
a turn to mechanics ; and if you force the mechanic-by-na- 
ture to become a farmer he will make a bad farmer, and the 
nation will lose the advantage of all his power and invention. 
That the whole of the possible employments of the human 
race are in a measure necessary employments — necessary to 
the making up of a nation. That every concession to Free 
Trade cuts out of all chance of action some of the faculties 



Protection. 825 

of the American national mind, and, in so doing, weakens 
and debases it. That each and every class of workers is of 
such importance to the country that we must make any sacri- 
fice necessary to maintain them in full work. " The national 
mind is manifold," he said ; " and if you do not keep up ev- 
ery branch of employment in every district you waste the na- 
tional force. If we were to remain a purely agricultural peo- 
ple land would fall into fewer and fewer hands, and our peo- 
13le become more and more brutalized as the years rolled on." 

It must not be supposed that Protection is entirely de- 
fended upon these strange new grounds. "Save us from 
the pauper-labor of Europe," is the most recent as well as 
the oldest of Protectionist cries. The Australians and Amer- 
icans say, that by working women at Is. a day in the mines 
in Wales, and by generally degrading all laborers under the 
rank of highly-skilled artisans, the British keep wages so low 
that, in spite of the cost of carriages, they can almost invari- 
bly undersell the colonists and Americans in American and 
Australian markets. This state of degradation and poverty 
nothing can force them to introduce into their own countries^ 
and, on the other hand, they consider manufactures necessa- 
ry for the national purpose alluded to before. The alterna- 
tive is Protection. 

The most unavoidable of all the difficulties of Protection 
— namely, that no human government can ever be trusted 
to adjust protective taxation without corruption — is no ob- 
jection to the Prohibition which the Western Protectionists 
demand. The New Englanders say, " Let us meet the En- 
glish on fair terms;" the Western men say that they will 
not meet them at all. Some of the l^ew York Protectionists 
declare that their object is merely the fostering of American 
manufactures until they are able to stand alone, the United 
States not having at present reached the point which had 
been attained by other nations when they threw Protection 
to the winds. Such halting Protectionists as these manu- 
facturers find no sympathy in Australia or the West, al- 
though the highest of all Protectionists look forward to the 
distant time when, local centres being everywhere establish- 
ed, customs will be abolished on all sides, and mankind form 
one family. 



826 Greater Britain. 

The chief thing to be borne in mind in discussing Protec- 
tion with an Australian or an American is that he never 
thinks of denying that under Protection he pays a higher 
price for his goods than he would if he bought them from us, 
and that he admits at once that he temporarily pays a tax 
of 15 or 20 per cent, upon every thing he buys in order to 
help set his country on the road to national unity and ulti- 
mate wealth. Without Protection, the American tells you, 
there will be commercial Xew York, sugar-growing Louisi- 
ana, the corn-growing N^orth-west, but no America. Pro- 
tection alone can give him a united country. When we talk 
about things being to the advantage or disadvantage of a 
country the American Protectionist asks what you mean. 
Admitting that all you say against Protection may be true, 
he says that he had sooner see America supporting a hun- 
dred millions independent of the remainder of the world than 
two hundred millions dependent for clothes upon the British. 
"You, on the other hand," he says, "would prefer our cus- 
tom. How can we discuss the question? The difference 
between us is radical, and we have no base on which to 
build." 

It is a common doctrine in the colonies of England that 
a nation can not be called " independent " if it has to cry 
out to another for supplies of necessaries ; that true nation- 
al existence is first attained when the country becomes ca- 
pable of supplying to its own citizens those goods without 
which they can not exist in the state of comfort which they 
have already reached. Political is apt to follow upon com- 
mercial dependency, they say. 

The question of Protection is bound up with the wider 
one of whether we are to love our fellow-subjects, our race, 
or the world at large ; whether we are to pursue our coun- 
try's good at the expense of other nations? There is a 
growing belief in England that the noblest philosophy is to 
deny the existence of the moral right to benefit ourselves by 
harming others ; that love of mankind must in time replace 
love of race as that has in part replaced narrow patriotism 
and love of self. It would seem that our Free Trade system 
lends itself better to these wide modern sympathies than 
does Protection. On the other hand, it may be argued that, 



Protection. 327 

if every State consults the good of its own citizens, we shall, 
by the action of all nations, obtain the desired happiness of 
the whole world, and this with rapidity, from the reason 
that every country understands its own interests better 
than it does those of its neighbor. As a rule, the colonists 
hold that they should not protect themselves against the 
sister-colonies, but only against the outer world ; and while 
I was in Melbourne an arrangement was made with respect 
to the border customs between Victoria and New South 
Wales ; but this is at present the only step tl^ft has been 
taken toward intercolonial Free Trade. 

It is passing strange that Victoria should be noted for 
the eagerness with which her people seek Protection. Pos- 
sessed of little coal, they appear to be attempting artificially 
to create an industry which, owing to this sad lack of fuel, 
must languish from the moment that it is let alone. Sidney 
coal sells in Melbourne at thirty shillings a ton ; at the pit's 
mouth at Newcastle, New South Wales, it fetches only seven 
or eight shillings. With regard, however, to the making- 
up of native produce, the question in the case of Victoria is 
merely this : Is it cheaper to carry the wool to the coal, 
and then the woolen goods back again, than to carry the 
coal to the wool ? and as long as Victoria can continue to 
export wheat, so that the coal-ships may not want freight, 
wool manufactures may prosper in Victoria. 

The Victorians naturally deny that the cost of coal has 
much to do with the question. The French manufacturers, 
they point out, with dearer coal, but with cheaper labor, have 
in many branches of trade beaten the English out of com- 
mon markets, but then under Protection there is no chance 
of cheap labor iu Victoria. 

Writing for the Englishmen of Old England, it is not n&c- 
essary for me to defend Free Trade by any arguments. As 
far as we in our island are concerned, it is so manifestly to 
the pocket interest of almost all of us, and at the same time, 
on account of the minuteness of our territory, so little dan- 
gerous politically, that for Britain there can be no danger of 
a deliberate relapse into Protection, although we have but 
little right to talk about Free Trade so long as we continue 
our enormous subsidies to the Cunard liners. 



328 Greater Britain. 

The American argument in favor of Prohibition is in the 
main, it will be seen, political, the economical objections be- 
ing admitted, but outweighed. Our action in the matter of 
our postal contracts, and in the case of the factory acts, at 
all events shows that we are not ourselves invariably averse 
to distinguish between the political and the economical as- 
pect of certain questions. 

My duty has been to chronicle what is said and thought 
upon the matter in our various plantations. One thing at 
least is clgbf — that even if the opinions I have recorded be 
as ridiculous when aj)plied to Australia or America as they 
would be when applied to England, they are not supported 
'by a selfish clique, but rest upon the generosity and self-sac- 
Tifice of a majority of the population. 



CHAPTER Vn. 

LABOR. 

Side by side with the unselfish Protectionism of the dig- 
gers, there flourishes among the artisans of the Australias a 
self-interested desire for non-intercourse with the outside 
world. 

In America, the working-men, themselves almost without 
exception immigrants, though powerful in the various States 
from holding the balance of parties, have never as yet been 
able to make their voices heard in the Federal Congress. In 
the chief Australian colonies, on the other hand, the artisans 
have, more than any other class, the possession of political 
power. Throughout the world the grievance of the working- 
classes lies in the fact that, while trade and profits have in- 
creased enormously within the last few years, true as dis- 
tinguished from nominal wages have not risen. It is even 
doubtful whether the American or British handicraftsman 
can now live in such comfort as he could make sure of a few 
years back: it is certain that agricultural laborers in the 
south of England are worse off than they were ten years ago, 
although the depreciation of gold prevents us from accurate- 
ly gauging their true position. In Victoria and 'New South 
Wales, and in the States of Wisconsin, Illinois, and Missouri, 



Labor. 829 

where the artisans possess some share of power, they have set 
about the attempt to remedy by law the grievance under 
which they suffer. In the American States, where the sup- 
pression of immigration seems almost impossible, their inter- 
ference takes the shape of eight-hour bills and exclusion of 
colored laborers. There is no trades-union in America which 
will admit to membership a Chinaman, or even a mulatto. In 
Victoria and ISTew South Wales, however, it is not difficult 
quietly to put a check upon the importation of foreign labor. 
The vast distance from Europe makes the unaided immigra- 
tion of artisans extremely rare, and since the democrats have 
been in power the funds for assisted immigration have been 
withheld, and the Chinese influx all but forbidden, while 
manifestoes against the ordinary European immigration have 
repeatedly been published at Sydney by the Council of the 
Associated Trades. 

The Sydney operatives have always taken a leading part 
in opposition to immigration, from the time when they found- 
ed the Anti-transportation Committee up to the present day. 
In 1847 a natural and proper wish to prevent the artificial 
depression of wages was at the bottom of the anti-transporta- 
tion movement, although the arguments made use of in the 
petition to the queen were of the most general character, and 
Sydney mechanics, many of them free immigrants themselves, 
say that there is no difference of principle between the intro- 
duction of free or assisted immigrants and that of convicts. 

If we look merely to the temporary results of the policy 
of the Australian artisans we shall find it hard to deny that 
their acts are calculated momentarily to increase their ma- 
terial prosperity ; so far they may be selfish, but they are 
not blind. Admitting that wages depend on the ratio of 
capital to population, the Australians assert that, with them, 
population increases faster than capital, and that hindering 
immigration will restore the balance. Prudential checks on 
population are useless, they say, in face of Irish immigration. 
At the same time, it is clear that, from the discouragement 
of immigration and limitation to eight hours of the daily toil, 
there results an exceptional scarcity of labor, which cramps 
the development of the countrj'', and causes a depression in 
trade which must soon diminish the wage-fund, and react 



330 Geeater Britain. 

upon the working-men. It is unfortunately the fact that 
colonial artisans do not sufficiently bear in mind the distinc- 
tion between real and nominal wages, but are easily caught 
by the show of an extra few shillings a week, even though 
the purchasing power of each shilling be diminished by the 
change. When looked into, " higher wages " often mean 
that the laborer, instead of starving upon ten shilings a week, 
is to starve upon twenty. 

As regards the future, contrasted with the temporary con- 
dition of the Australian laborer, there is no disguising the 
fact that mere exclusion of immigration will not in the long 
run avail him. It might, of course, be urged that immigra- 
tion is, even in America, a small matter by the side of the 
natural increase of the people, and that to shut out the immi- 
grant is but one of many checks to population ; but in Aus- 
tralia the natural increase is not so great as in a young coun- 
try might be expected. The men so largely outnumber the 
women in Australia that even early marria'ges and^arge fami- 
lies can not make the birth-rate very high, and fertile land 
being at present still to be obtained at first hand, the new 
agricultural districts swallow up the natural increase of the 
population. Still important as is immigration at this moment, 
ultimately through the influx of women — to which the dem- 
ocrats are not opposed — or, more slowly, by the effort of 
nature to restore the balance of the sexes, the rate of natural 
increase will become far greater in Australia. Ultimately, 
there can be no doubt, if the Australian laborer continues to 
retain his present standard of comfort, prudential checks upon 
the birth of children will be requisite to maintain the present 
ratio of capital to population. 

Owing to the comparatively high prices fixed for agricult- 
ural land in the three south-eastern colonies of Australia, 
the abundance of unoccupied tracts has not hitherto had that 
influence on wages in Australia which it appears to have ex- 
ercised in America; but under the democratic amendments 
of the existing free selection system wages will probably 
again rise in the colonies, to be once more reduced by immi- 
gration, or, if the democracy gains the day, more slowly low- 
ered by the natural increase of the population. 

In places where competition has reduced the reward of 



Labor. 331 

labor to the lowest amount consistent with the efficiency of 
the work, compulsory restriction of the hours of toil must evi- 
dently be an unmixed benefit to the laborer until carried to 
the point at which it destroys the trade in which he is en- 
gaged. In America and Australia, however, where the labor- 
er has a margin of luxuries which can be cut down, and where 
the manufacturers are still to some extent competing with 
European rivals, restriction of hours puts them at a disadvan- 
tage with the capitalists of the Old World, and, reducing their 
profits, tends also to diminish the wage-fund, and ultimately 
to decrease the wasres of their men. The colonial action in 
this matter may, nevertheless, like all infringements of gener- 
al economic laws, be justified by proof of the existence of a 
higher necessity for breaking than for adhering to the rule of 
freedom. Our own factory acts, we should remember, were 
undoubtedly calculated to diminish the production of the 
country. 

Were the American and Australian handicraftsmen to be- 
come sufficiently powerful to combine strict Protection, or 
prohibition of foreign intercourse, with reduction of hours of 
toil, they would ultimately drive capital out of their coun- 
tries, and either lower wages, or else diminish the population 
by checking both immigration and natural increase. Here, 
as in the consideration of Protection, we come to that bar to 
all discussion, the question, " What is a nation's good ?" It 
is at least doubtful whether in England we do not attach too 
great importance to the continuance of nations in " the pro- 
gressive state." Unrestricted immigration may destroy the 
literature, the traditions, the nationality itself of the invaded 
country, and it is a quea^ion whether these ideas are not 
worth preserving even at a cost of a few figures in the re- 
turns of imports, exports, and population. A country in 
which Free Trade princij^les have been carried to their utmost 
logical development must be cosmopolitan and nationless, 
and for such a state of things to exist universally without 
danger to civilization the world is not yet prepared. 

" Know-nothingism " in America, as what is now styled 
" Native Americanism " was once called — a form of the pro- 
test against the exaggeration of Free Trade — was founded 
by handicraftsmen, and will in all probability find its main 



382 Greater Britain. 

support within their ranks whenever the time for its inevitable 
resuscitation shall arrive. Ths^ there is honest pride of race 
at the bottom of the agitation no one can doubt who knows 
the historj'- of the earliei* Know-nothing movement ; but class 
interest happens to point the same way as does the instinct 
of the race. The refusal of political privileges to immigrants 
will have some tendency to check the flow of immigration ; 
at all events, it will check the self-assertion of the immigrants. 
That which does this leaves, too, the control of wages more 
within the hands of actual laborers, and prevents the Euro- 
pean laborers of the eleventh hour coming in to share the 
heightened wages for which the American hands have struck, 
and suffered misery and want. No consistent republican can 
object to the making ten or twenty years' residence in the 
United States the condition for citizenship of the land. 

In the particular case of the Australian colonies, they are 
happily separated from Ireland by seas so wide as to have a 
chance of preserving a distinct nationality such as America 
can scarcely hope for : only 1500 persons have come to 'New 
Sduth "Wales, unassisted, in the last five years. The burden 
of proof lies upon those who propose to destroy the rising 
nationality by assisting the importation of a mixed multitude 
of negroes. Chinamen, Hill-coolies, Irish, and Germans, in or- 
der that the imports and exports of Victoria and New South 
Wales may be increased, and that there may be a larger 
number of so-called Victorians and New South Welsh to live 
in misery. 

Owing to the fostering of immigration by the aristocratic 
government, the population of Queensland had, in 1866, quad- 
rupled itself since 1860; but, ev^ were the other colonies 
inclined to follow the example of their northern sister, they 
could not do so with success. New South Wales and Tas- 
mania might import colonists by the thousand, but they would 
be no sooner landed than they would run to Queensland, or 
sail to the New Zealand diggings, just as the " Canadian im- 
migrants " flock into the United States. 

That phase of the labor question to which I have last al- 
luded seems to shape itself into the question, "Shall the 
laborer always and everywhere be encouraged or permitted 
to carry his labor to the best market?" The Australians 



Labor. 333 

answea- that they are willing to admit that additional hands 
in a new country means additional wealth, but that there is 
but little good in our preaching moral restraint to them if 
European immigration is to be encouraged, Chinese allowed. 
The only effect, they say, that self-control can have is that of 
giving such children as they rear Chinamen or Irishmeu to 
struggle against instead of brothers. It is hopeless to ex- 
pect that the Australian workmen will retain their present 
standard of comfort if an influx of dark-skinned handicrafts- 
men is permitted. 

Some ten or even fewer years ago we Free Traders of the 
Western world, first then coming to know some little about 
the kingdoms of the further East, paused a moment in our 
daily toil to lift to the skies our hands in lamentation at the 
blind exclusiveness which we were told had for ages past 
held sway within the council-chambers of Pekiu. 'No words 
were too strong for our new-found laughing-stock ; China be- 
came for us what we are to Parisian journalists — a Boeotia 
redeemed only by a certain eccentricity of folly. This vast 
hive, swarming with two hundred million working bees, was 
said to find its interest in shutting out the world, punishing 
with death the outgoing and incoming of the people. " China 
for the Chinese " was the common war-cry of the rulers and 
the ruled ; " Self-contained has China been, and prospered ; 
self-contained she shall continue," the favorite maxim of 
their teachers. JSTothing could be conceived nobler than the 
scorn which mingled with half-doubting incredulity and with 
Pharisaic thanking of heaven that we were not as they, when 
the blindness of these outer barbarians of " Gog and Ma- 
gog land " was drawn for us by skillful pens, and served out 
with all the comments that self-complacency could suggest. 
A conversion in the future was foretold, however ; this Chi- 
nese infirmity of vision was not to last forever ; the day would 
come when Studentships in Political Economy would be 
founded in Pekin, and Ricardo take the place of Cou-fou-chow 
in Thibetian schools. A conversion has taken place of late, 
but not that hoped for ; or, if it be a conversion consistent 
with the truths of economic science, it has taken a strange 
shape. The wise men of Canton may be tempted, perhaps, 
to think that it is we who have learned the wisdom of the 



334: Greater Britain. 

sages, and been brought back into the fold of the great mas- 
ter. Chinese immigration is heavily taxed in California; 
taxed to the point of prohibition in Victoria ; and forbidden 
under heavy penalties in Louisiana and other ex-rebel States. 

The Chinaman is pushing himself to the fore wherever his 
presence is allowed. We find Chinese helmsmen and quar- 
termasters in the service of the Messageries and Oriental 
Companies receiving twice the wages paid to Indian Lascars. 
We hear of the importation of Chinese laborers into India for 
railway and for drainage works. The Chinaman has great 
vitality. Of the cheap races the Mongol is the most pushing, 
the likeliest to conquer in the fight. It would almost seem 
as though we were wrong in our common scales of prefer- 
ence ; far from right in our use of the terms " superior " and 
" inferior " races. 

A well-taught white man can outreason or can overreach 
a well-taught Chinaman or negro. But under some climatic 
conditions the negro can outwork the white man; under al- 
most all conditions the Chinaman can outwork him. Where 
this is the case, is it not the Chinaman or the negro that 
should be called the better man ? Call him what we may, 
will he not prove his superiority by working the Englishman 
off the soil ? In Florida and Mississippi the black is certain- 
ly the better man. 

Many Victorians, even those who respect and admire the 
Chinese, are in favor of the imposition of a tax upon the yel^ 
low immigrants, in order to prevent the destruction of the 
rising Australian nationality. They fear that otherwise 
they will live to see the English element swamped in the 
Asiatic throughout Australia. It is not certain that we may 
not some day have to encounter a similar danger in Old En- 
gland. 

It will be seen from the account thus given of the state 
of the labor question in Australia, that the colonial handi- 
craftsmen stand toward those of the world in much the same 
relative position as that held by the members of a trade-un- 
ion toward the other workmen of the same trade. The limit- 
ation of immigration has much the same efiects as the limit- 
ation of apprentices in a single trade in England. It is easy 
to say that the difference between fellow-countryman and 



Labor. 335 

foreigner is important ; that while it is an unfairness to all 
English workmen that English hatters should limit appren- 
tices, it is not unfair to English hatters that Australian hat- 
ters should limit their apprentices. For my own part, I am 
inclined to think that, 'fair or unfair — and we have no inter- 
natioii^l moral rule to decide the question — we might at least 
say to Australia that, while she throws upon us the chief ex- 
penses of her defense, she is hardly in a position to refuse to 
aid our emigrants. 

Day by day the labor question in its older aspects becomes 
of less and less importance. The relationship of master and 
servant is rapidly dying th.e death ; co-operative farming and 
industrial partnerships must supersede it everywhere at no 
distant date. In these systems we shall find the remedy 
against the decline of trade with which the English-speak- 
ing countries of the earth are threatened. 

The existing system of labor is anti-democratic ; it is at 
once productive of and founded on the existence of an aris- 
tocracy of capital and a servitude of workmen ; and our En- 
glish democracies can not afford that half their citizens 
should be dependent laborers. If manufactures are to be con- 
sistent with democracy they must be carried on in shops in 
which each man shall be at once capitalist and handicrafts- 
man. Such institutions are already in existence in Massa- 
chusetts, in Illinois, in Pennsylvania, and in Sydney ; while 
at Troy, in New York State, there is a great iron-foundery 
owned from roof to floor by the men who work in it. It is 
not enough that the workman should share in the profits. 
The change which, continuing through the Middle Ages into 
the present century, has at last everywhere 6onverted the 
relation of lord and slave into that of master and hireling, is 
already giving place to the silent revolution which is steadi- 
ly substituting for this relationship of capital and labor that 
of a perfect marriage, in which the laborer and the capitalist 
shall be one. 

Under this system there can be no strikes, no petty trick- 
ery, no jealousy, no waste of time. Each man's individual in- 
terest is coincident with that of all. Where the labor is 
that of a brotherhood the toil becomes ennobled. Were in- 
dustrial partnerships a new device their inventor would need 



336 Geeater Britain. 

no monument ; his would be found in the future history of 
the race. As it is, this latest advance of Western civilization 
is but a return to the earliest and noblest form of labor ; the 
Arabs, the Don Cossacks, the Maori tribes are all co-opera- 
tive farmers ; it is the mission of the English race to apply 
the ancient principle to manufacturers. • 



CHAPTER VIII. 

WOMAJ?-. 



In one respect Victoria stands at once sadly behind and 
strangely in advance of other democratic countries. Wom- 
en, or at least some women,- vote at the Lower House elec- 
tions, but, on the other hand, the legal position of the sex is 
almost as inferior to that of man as it is in England or the 
East. 

At an election held some few years ago female rate-pay- 
ers voted everywhere throughout Victoria. Upon examina- 
tion it was found that a new Registration Act had directed 
the rate-books to be used as a basis for the preparation of 
the electoral lists, and that women householders had been 
legally put on the register, although the intention of the 
Legislature was not expressed, and the question of female 
voting had not been raised during the debates. Another in- 
stance, this, of the singular way in which in truly British 
countries reforms are brought about by accident, and, when 
once become facts, are allowed to stand. There is no more 
sign of general adhesion in Australia than in England to the 
doctrine which asserts that women, as well as men, being 
interested in good government, should have a voice in the 
selection of that government to which they are forced to 
submit. 

As far as concerns their social position, women are as 
badly off in Australia as in England. Our theory of mar- 
riage — which has b«en tersely explained thus, "The hus- 
band and wife are one, and the husband is that one " — rules 
as absolutely at the antipodes as it does in Yorksjiire. I was 
daily forced to remember the men of Kansas and Missouri, 
and the widely different view they take of these matters to 



Woman. 837 

that of the Australians. As they used to tell me, they are 
impatient of seeing their women ranked with " lunatics and 
idiots " in the catalogue of incapacities. They are unable 
to see that women are much better represented by their male 
friends than were the Southern blacks by their owners or 
overseers. They believe that the process of election would 
not be more purified by female emancipation than would the 
character of the Parliaments elected. 

The Kansas people often say that if you were told that 
there existed in some ideal country two great sections of a 
race, the members of the one often gross, often vicious, often 
given to loud talking, to swearing, to drinking, spitting, 
chewing ; not infrequently corrupt ; those of the other branch, 
*mild, kind, quiet, pure, devout, with none of the habitual 
vices of the first-named sect — if you were told that one of 
these branches was alone to elect rulers and to govern, you 
would at once say, " Tell us where this happy country is that 
basks in the rule of such a god-like people." " Stop a min- 
ute," says your informant, " it is the creatures I described 
first — the men — who rule ; the others are only women, poor 
silly fools — imperfect men, I assure you ; nothing more." 

It is somewhat the fashion to say that the so-called " ex- 
travagances " of the Kansas folk and other American West- 
ern men arise from the extraordinary position given to their 
women by the disproportion of the sexes. Now in all the 
Australian colonies the men vastly outnumber the women, 
yet the disproportion has none of those results which have 
been attributed to it by some writers on America. In New 
South Wales the sexes are as 250,000 to 200,000, in Victo- 
ria 370,000 to 280,000, in New Zealand 130,000 to 80,000, in 
Queensland 60,000 to 40,000, in Tasmania 60,000 to 40,000, 
in West Australia 14,000 to 8000, and 90,000 to 80,000 in 
South Australia. In all our Southern colonies together there 
are a million of men to only three-quarters of a million of 
women; yet with all this disproportion, which far exceeds 
that in Western America, not only have the women failed 
to acquire any great share of power, political or social, but 
they are content to occupy a position not relatively superior 
to that held by them at home. 

The " Sewing Clubs " of the war-time are at the bottom 



338 Gkeater Bkitain. 

of a good deal of the " woman movement " in America. At 
the time of greatest need the ladies of the Northern States 
formed themselves into associations for the suj)ply of lint, 
of linen, and of comforts to the army : the women of a dis- 
trict would meet together daily in some large room, and 
sew, and chat while they were sewing. 

The British section of the Teutonic race seems naturally 
inclined, through the operation of its old interest-begotten 
prejudices, to rank women where Plato placed them in the 
" Timseus," along with horses and draught-cattle, or to think 
of them much as he did when he said that all the brutes de- 
rived their origin from man by a series of successive degra- 
dations, of which the first was from man to woman. There 
is, however, one strong reason why the English should, in 
America, have laid aside their prejudices upon this point, re- 
taining them in Australia, where the conditions are not the 
same. Among farming peoples, whose women do not work 
regularly in the field, the woman, to whom falls the house- 
hold and superior work, is better ojff than she is among town- 
dwelling peoples. The Americans are mainly a farming, the 
Australians and British mainly a town-dwelling people. The 
absence in all sections of our race of regular woman labor in 
the field seems to be a remnant of the high estimation in 
which women were held by our German ancestry. In Brit- 
ain we have, until the last few years, been steadily retro- 
grading upon this point. 

It is a serious question how far the natural prejudice of 
the English mind against the labor of what we call " inferior 
races " will be found to extend to half the superior race it- 
self. How will English laborers receive the inevitable com- 
petition of women in many of their fields? "Woman is at 
present starved, if she works at all and does not rest content 
in dependence upon some man, by the terrible lowness of 
wages in every employment open to her, and this low rate 
of wages is itself the direct result of the fewness of the oc- 
cupations which society allows her. Where a man can see 
a hundred crafts in which he mav eno^aore, a woman will 
perhaps be permitted to find ten. A hundred times as many 
women as there is room for invade each of this small num- 
ber of employments. In the Australian labor-field the pros- 



Victorian Ports. 339 

pects of women are no better than they are in Europe, and 
during my residence in Melbourne the Council of the Asso- 
ciated Trades passed a resolution to the effect that nothing 
could justify the employment of women in any kind of pro- 
ductive labor. 



CHAPTER IX. 

VICTORIAN POETS. 



All allowance being made for the great number of wide 
roads for trade, there is still a singular absence of traffic in 
the Melbourne streets. Trade may be said to be transacted 
only upon paper in the city, while the tallow, grain, and wool 
which form the basis of Australian commerce do not pass 
through Melbourne, but skirt it, and go by railway to Wil- 
liamstown, Sandridge, and Geelong. 

Geelong, once expected to rival Melbourne, and become 
the first port of all Australia, I found grass-grown and half 
deserted, with but one vessel lying at her wharf. At Wil- 
liamstown a great fleet of first-class ships was moored along- 
side the pier. When the gold-find at Ballarat took place 
Geelong rose fast as the digging port, but her citizens chose 
to complete the railway line to Melbourne instead of first 
opening that to Ballarat, and so lost all the up-country trade. 
Melbourne, having once obtained the lead, soon managed to 
control the Legislature, and grants were made for the Echu- 
ca Railroad, which tapped the Murray, and brought the trade 
of Upper Queensland and N^ew South Wales down to Mel- 
bourne, in the interest of the ports of Williamstown and 
Sandridge. ^ot content with ruining Geelong, the Melbourne 
men have set themselves to ridicule it. One of their stories 
goes that the Geelong streets bear such a fine crop of grass 
that a free selector has applied to have them surveyed and 
sold to him, under the 42d clause of the ISTew Land Act. 
Another story tells how a Geelongee lately died and went 
to heaven. Peter, opening the door to his knock, asked, 
"Where from?" "Geelong." "Where?" said Peter. "Gee- 
long." "There's no such place," replied the Apostle. "In 
Victoria," cried the colonist. " Fetch Ham's Australian At- 



840 Greater Britain. 

las," called Peter ; .and when the map was brought and the 
spot shown to him, he replied, " Well, I beg your pardon, but 
I really never had any one here from that place before." 

If Geelong be standing still, which in a colony is the same 
as rapid decline would be with us, the famed wheat country 
around it seems as inexhaustible as it ever was. The whole 
of the Barrab(¥)l range, from Ceres to Mount Moriac, is one 
great golden waving sheet, save where it is broken by the 
stunted claret-vineyards. Here and there I came upon a 
group of the little daughters of the German vine-dressers 
tending and trenching the plants, with the round eyes, rosy 
cheeks, and shiny pigtails of their native Rudesheim all 
flourishing beneath the Southern Cross. 

The colonial vines are excellent ; better, indeed, than the 
growths of California, which, however, they resemble in gen- 
eral character. The wines are naturally all Burgundies, and 
colonial imitations of claret, port, and sherry are detestable, 
and the hocks but little better. The Albury Hermitage is a 
better wine than can be bought in Europe at its price, but 
in some places this wine is sold as Murray Burgundy, while 
the dealers foist horrible stuff upon you under the name of 
Hermitage. Of the wines of N'ew South Wales, White Dall- 
wood is a fair Sauterne, and White Cawarra a good Chablis, 
while for sweet wines the Chasselas is cheap ; and the Tokay, 
the Shiraz, and the still Muscat are full of flavor. 

ISTorth-west of Geelong, upon the summit of the foot-hills 
of the dividing range, lies Ballarat, the head-quarters of deep 
quartz-mining, and now no longer a diggers' camp, but a 
graceful city, full of shady boulevards and noble building.s, 
and with a stationary population of thirty thousand. My 
first visit was made in the company of the prime ministers 
of all the colonies, who were at Melbourne nominally for a 
conference, but really to enjoy a holiday and the Intercolo- 
nial Exhibition. With that extraordinary generosity in the 
spending of other people's money which distinguishes Co- 
lonial Cabinets, the Victorian Government placed special 
trains, horses, carriages, and hotels at our disposal, the result 
of which was that, feted everywhere, we saw nothing, and I 
had to return to Ballarat in order even to go through the 
mines. 



Victoria Ports. 841 

In visiting Lake Learmouth and Clunes, and the mining 
district on each side of Ballarat, I found myself able to dis- 
cover the date of settlement by the names of places, as one 
finds the age of a London suburb by the titles of its terraces. 
The dates run in a wave across the country. St. Arnaud is a 
town between Ballarat and Castlemaine, and Alma lies near 
to it, while Balaklava Hill is near Ballarat, where also are 
Raglan and Sebastopol. Inkerman lies close to Castlemaine, 
and Mount Cathcart bears the name of the general killed at 
the Two-gun Battery, while the Malakoff diggings, discov- 
ered doubtless toward the end of the war, lie to the north- 
ward, in the Wimmera. 

Everywhere I found the interior far hotter than the coast, 
but free from the sudden changes of temperature that occur 
in Melbourne twice or thrice a week throughout the sum- 
mer, and are dangerous to children and to persons of weak 
health. After two or three days of the hot wind there 
comes a night, breathless, heavy, still. In the morning the 
sun rises, once more fierce and red. After such a night and 
dawn I have seen the shade thermometer in the cool ve- 
randas of the Melbourne Club standing at 95° before ten 
o'clock, when suddenly the sun and sky would change from 
red and brown to gold and blue, and a merry breeze, whis- 
tling up from the ice-packs of the South Pole and across the 
Antarctic seas, would lower the temperature in an hour to 
60° or 65°. After a few days of cold and rain a quiet En- 
glish morning would be cut in half about eleven by a sud- 
den slamming of doors and whirling of dust from the north 
across the town, while darkness came upon the streets. 
Then was heard the cry of " Shut the windows ; here's a hot 
wind," and down would go every window, barred and bolt- 
ed, while the oldest colonists walked out to enjoy the dry 
air and healthy heat. The thick walls of the clubs and pri- 
vate houses will keep out the heat for about three days, but 
if, as sometimes happens, the hot wind lasts longer, then the 
walls are heated through, and the nights are hardly to be 
borne. Up the country the settlers know nothing of these 
changes. The irregularity is peculiar to the Melbourne sum- 
mer. 



342 Greater Britain. 



CHAPTER X. 

TASMAlSnA. 

After the parching heat of Australia a visit to Tasmania 
was a grateful change. Steaming along Port Dalrymple 
and up the Tamar in the soft sunlight of an English after- 
noon, we were able to. look upward, and enjoy the charming 
views of wood and river, instead of having to stand with 
downcast head, as in the blaze of the Victorian sun. 

The beauty of the Tamar is of a quiet kind ; its scenery 
like that of the non-Alpine districts or the west coast of New 
Zealand, but softer and more smiling than is that of even 
the least rude portions of those islands. To one fresh from 
the baked Australian plains there is likeness between any 
green and humid land and the last unparched country that 
he may have seen. Still, N^ew Zealand can not show fresher 
cheeks nor homes more cozy than those of the Tamar valley. 
Somersetshire can not surpass the orchards of Tasmania, nor 
Devon match its flowers. 

The natural resemblance of Maria Van Diemen's Land 
(as Tasma called it after his betrothed) to England seems to 
have struck the early settlers. In sailing up the Tamar we 
had on one bank the county of Dorset, with its villages 
touchingly named after those at home, according to their 
situations, from its Lulworth Cove, Corfe Castle, and St. Al" 
ban's Head, round to Abbotsbury, and, on our right hand, 
Devon, with its Sidmouth, Exeter, and Torquay. 

Hurrying through Launceston — a pretty little town, of 
which the banks and Post-office are models of simple archi- 
tecture — ^I passed at once across the island southward to 
Hobarton, the capital. The scenery on the great convict 
road is not impressive. The Tasmanian Mountains — detach- 
ed and rugged masses of balsaltic rock from four to five 
thousand feet in height — are wanting in grandeur when seen 
from a distance, with a foreground of flat corn-land. . It is 
disheartening, too, in an English colony, to see half the 
houses shut up and deserted, and acre upon acre of old 



Tasmania. 843 

wheat-land abandoned to mimosa scrub. The people in 
these older portions of the island have worked their lands to 
death, and even guano seems but to galvanize them into a 
momentary life. Since leaving Virginia I had seen no such 
melancholy sight. 

Nature is bountiful enough; in the world there is not a 
fairer climate ; the gum-trees grow to 350 feet, attesting the 
richness of the soil ; and the giant tree-ferns are never in- 
jured by heat, as in Australia, nor by cold, as in New Zea- 
land. All the fruits of Europe are in season at the same 
time, and the Christmas dessert at Hobarton often consists 
of five-and-twenty distinct fresh fruits. Even more than 
Britain, Tasmania may be said to present in a small area an 
epitome of the globe ; mountain and plain, forest and rolling 
prairie-land, rivers and grand capes, and the noblest harbor 
in the world, all are contained in a country the size of Ire- 
land. It is unhappily not only in this sense that Tasmania 
is the Ireland of the South. 

Beautiful as is the view of Hobarton from Mount Wel- 
lington — the spurs in the foreground clothed with a crimson 
carpet by a heath-like plant ; the city nestled under the ba- 
saltic columns of the crags — even here it is difficult to avoid 
a certain gloom when the eye, sweeping over the vast ex- 
panse of Storm Bay and D'Entrecasteaux Sound, discovers 
only three great ships in a harbor fitted to contain the navies 
of the world. 

The scene first of the horrible deeds of early convict days 
at Macquarie Harbor and Port Arthur, and later of the still 
more frightful massacres of the aboriginal inhabitants of the 
isle. Van Diemen's Land has never been a name of happy 
omen, and now the island, in changing its title, seems not to 
have escaped from the former blight. The poetry of the En- 
glish village names met with throughout Tasmania vanishes 
before the recollection of the circumstances under which the 
harsher native terms came to be supplanted. Fifty years 
ago our colonists found in Tasmania a powerful and numer- 
ous though degraded native race. At this moment three old 
women and a lad who dwell on Gun-carriage Rock, in Bass's 
Straits, are all who remain of the aboriginal population of 
the island. 



BU 



Greater Britain. 



We live in an age of mild liumanity, we are often told ; 
but, whatever the polish of manner and of minds in the Old 
Country, in outlying portions of the empire there is no lack 
of the old savagery of our race. Battues of the natives were 
conducted by the military in Tasmania not more than twen- 




C.OVERNOR DAVEYS 
PROCLAMATION 



■^ 



TO THE ABOR 



? / 



ty years ago, and are not unknown even now among the 
Queensland settlers. Let it not be thous^ht that Encrlishmen 
go out to murder natives unprovoked ; they have that prov- 
ocation for which even the Spaniards in Mexico used to wait, 
and which the Brazilians wait for now — the provocation of 



Tasmania. 845 

robberies committed in tbe neighborhood by natives un- 
known. It is not that there is no offense to punish, it is that 
the punishment is indiscriminate, that even when it falls upon 
the guilty it visits men who know no better. Where one 
wretched untaught native pilfers from a sheep-station on the 
Queensland Downs, a dozen will be shot by the settlers " as 
an example," and the remainder of the tribe brought back to 
the district to be fed and kept, until whisky, rum, and other 
devils' missionaries have done their work. 

Nothing will persuade the rougher class of Queensland 
settlers that the "black-fellow" and his "jin" are human. 
They tell you freely that they look upon the native Austra- 
lian as an ingenious kind of monkey, and that it is not for us 
to talk too much of the treatment of the " jins," or native 
women, while the " wrens " of the Curragh exist among our- 
selves. 'No great distance . appears to separate us from the 
days when the Spaniar(^ in the "West Indies used to brand 
on the face and arms all the natives they could catch, and 
gamble them away for wine. 

Though not more than three or four million acres out of 
seventeen million acres of land in Tasmania||^ave as yet been 
alienated by the Crown, the population has increased only by 
15,000 in the last ten years. Such is the indolence of the set- 
tlers that vast tracts of land in the central plain, once fertile 
under irrigation, have been allowed to fall back into a desert 
state from sheer neglect of the dams and conduits. Though 
iron and coal are abundant, they are seldom if ever worked, 
and one house in every thirty-two in the whole island is li- 
censed for the sale of spirits, of which the annual consump- 
tion exceeds five gallons a head for every man, woman, and 
child in the population. Tasmania reached her maximum of 
revenue in 1858, and her maximum of trade in 1853. 

The curse of the country is the indolence of its lotus-eat- 
ing population, who, like all dwellers in climates cool but 
wmterless, are content to dream away their lives in drowsi- 
ness to which the habits of a hotter but less equable clime — 
Queensland, for example — are energy itself. In addition, 
however, to this natural cause of decline. Van Diem en's Land 
is not yet free from all traces of the convict blood, nor from 
the evil effects of reliance on forced labor. It is, indeed, but 

P2 



346 Geeater Britain, 

a few years since the island was one great jail, and in 1853 
there were still 20,000 actual convicts in the country. The 
old free settlers will tell you that the deadly shade of slave 
labor has not blighted Jamaica more thoroughly than that 
of convict labor has Van Diemen's Land. 

Seventy miles north-west of Hobarton is a sheet of water 
called Macquarie Harbor, the deeds wrought upon the shores 
of which are not to be forgotten in a decade. In 1823 there 
were 228 prisoners at Macquarie Harbor, to whom, in the 
year, 229 floggings and 9925 lashes were ordered, 9100 lash- 
es being actually inflicted. The cat was, by order of the au- 
thorities, soaked in salt water and dried in the sun before be- 
ing used. There was at Macquarie Harbor one convict over- 
seer who took a delight in seeing his companions punished. 
A day seldom passed without five or six being flogged on his 
reports. The convicts were at his mercy. In a space of five 
years, during which the prisoners alf Macquarie Harbor aver- 
aged 250 in number, there were 835 floggings and 32,723 
lashes administered. In the same five years 112 convicts 
absconded from this settlement, of Whom ten ivere killed and 
eaten by their qMjapanions, seventy-five perished in the bush 
with or without cannibalism, two were captured with por- 
tions of human flesh in their possession, and died in hospital, 
two were shot, sixteen were hanged for murder and cannibal- 
ism, and seven are reported to have made good their escape, 
though this is by no means certain. 

It has been stated by a Catholic missionary bishop in his 
evidence before a Royal Commission, that when, after a mu- 
tiny at one of the stations, he read out to his men the names 
of thirty-one condemned to death, they with one accord fell 
upon their knees and solemnly thanked God that they were 
to be delivered from that horrible place. Men were known 
to commit murder that they might be sent away for trial, 
preferring death to Macquarie Harbor. 

The escapes were often made with the deliberate expecta- 
tion of death, the men perfectly knowing that they would 
have to draw lots for which should be killed and eaten. 
Nothing has ever been sworn to in the history of the world 
which, for revolting atrocity, can compare with the conduct 
of the Pierce-Greenhill party during their attempted escape. 



Tasmania. 847 

The testimony of Pierce is a revelation of the depths of 
degradation to which man can descend. The most fearful 
thought, when we hear of these Tasmanian horrors, is that 
probably many of those subjected to them were originally 
guiltless. If only one in a thousand was an innocent man, 
four human beings were consigned each year to hell on earth. 
We think, too, that the age of transportation for mere polit- 
ical offenses has long gone by, yet it is but eleven or twelve 
years since Mr. Frost received his pardon, after serving for 
sixteen years amid the horrors of Port Arthur. 

Tasmania has never been able to rid herself of the convict 
population in any great degree, for the free colonies have al- 
ways kept a jealous watch upon her emigrants. Even at the 
time of the great gold-rush to Victoria, almost every ''Tas- 
manian bolter," and many a suspected but innocent man, was 
seized upon his landing and thrown mto tentridge Jail, to 
toil within its twenty-foot walls, till death should come to 
his relief. Even now men of wealth and station in Victoria 
are sometimes discovered to have been " bolters " in the dig- 
ging times, and are at the mercy of theii* neighbors and the 
police unless the governor can be wheedled into granting 
pardons for their former deeds. A wealthy Victorian was 
arrested as a " Tasmanian bolter " while I was in the colony. 

The passport system is still in force in the free colonies 
with regard to passengers arriving from penal settlements, 
and there is a penalty of £100 inflicted upon captains of ships 
bringing convicts into Melbourne. The conditional pardons 
granted to prisoners in "West Australia and in Tasmania gen- 
erally contain words permitting the convict to visit any por- 
tion of the world except the British isles, but the clause is a 
mere dead letter, for none of our free colonies will receive even 
our pardoned convicts. 

It is hard to quarrel with the course the colonies have 
taken in this matter, for to them the transportation system ap- 
pears in the light of moral vitriol-throwing ; still, there is a 
wide distinction to be drawn between the action of the New 
South Welsh and that of the New Yorkers when they de- 
clared to a British Government of the last century that noth- 
ing should induce them to accept the labor of " white En- 
glish slaves :" the Sydney people have enjoyed the advantages 



848 Greatee Britain. 

of the system they now blame. Even the Victorians and 
South Australians, who have never had convicts in their land, 
can be met by argument. The Australian "colonies, it might 
be urged, were planted for the sole purpose of affording a 
suitable soil for the reception of British criminals : in face of 
this fact the remonstrances of the free colonists read some- 
what oddly, for it would seem as though men who quitted, 
with open eyes, Great Britain to make their home in the spots 
which their Government had chosen as its giant prisons, have 
little right to pretend to rouse themselves on a sudden, and 
cry out that England is pouring the scum of her soil on to a 
free land, and that they must rise and defend themselves 
against the grievous wrong. Weighing, however, calmly, the 
good and evil, we can not avoid the conclusion that the Vic- 
torians have much reason to object to a system which sends 
to another country a man who is too bad for his own, just as 
Jersey rogues are transported to Southampton. The Victo- 
rian proposition of selecting the most ruffianly of the colonial 
expirees, and shipping them to England in exchange for the 
convicts that we might send to Australia, was but a plagia- 
rism on the conduct of the Virginians in a similar case, who 
quietly began to freight a ship with snakes. 

The only cure for Tasmania, unless one is to be found in 
the mere lapse of years, lies in annexation to Victoria; a 
measure strongly wished for by a considerable party in each 
of the colonies concerned. No two countries in the world 
are more manifestly destined by nature to be complementary 
to each other. 

Owing to the small size of the country, and the great mor- 
al influence of the landed gentry, Tasmanian politics are sin- 
gularly peaceful. For the Lower House elections the suf- 
frage rests upon a household, not a manhood basis, as in Vic- 
toria and New South Wales ; and for the Upper House it is 
placed at £500 in any property, or £50 a year in freehold land. 
Tasmanian society is cast in a more aristocratic shape than 
is that of Queensland, with this exception the most oligarch- 
ical of all our colonies ; buteven here, as in the other colonies 
and the United States, the ballot is supported by the Con- 
servatives. Unlike what generally haj)pens in America, the 
vote in the great majority of cases is here kept secret, brib- 



Tasmania. 849 

ery is unknown, and, the public " nomination " of candidates 
having been abolished, elections pass off in perfect quiet. In 
the course of a dozen conversations in Tasmania I met with 
one man who attacked the ballot. He was the first person, 
aristocrat or democrat, conservative or liberal, male or female, 
silly or wise, by whom I had found the ballot opposed smce 
I left England. 

The method in which the ballot is conducted is simple 
enough. The returning officer sits in mt outer room, beyond 
which is an inner chamber with only one door, but with a 
desk. The voter gives his name to the returning officer, and 
receives a white ticket bearing his number on the register. 
On the ticket the names of the candidates are printed alpha- 
betically, and the voter, taking the paper into the other room, 
makes a cross opposite to the name of each candidate for 
whom he votes, and then brings the paper folded to the re- 
turning officer, who puts it in the box. In "New South Wales 
and Victoria, he runs his pen through all the names except- 
ing those for which he intends to vote, and himself deposits 
the ticket in the box, the returning officer watching him to 
see that he does not carry out his ticket to show it to his brib- 
ers, and then send it in again by a man on his own side. 
One scrutineer for each candidate watches the opening of the 
box. In Kew South Wales the voting-papers, after having 
been sealed up, are kept for five years, in order to allow of 
the verification of the number of votes said to have been cast; 
but in Tasmania they are destroyed immediately after the 
declaration of the poll. 

Escaping from the capital and its Liliputian politics, I 
sailed up the Derwent to ISTew Korfolk. The river reminds 
the traveller sometimes of the Meuse, but oftener of the 
Dart, and unites the beauties of both streams. The scenery 
is exquisitely set in a framework of hops ; for not only are 
all the flats covered with luxuriant bines, but the hills be- 
tween which you survey the views have also each its " gar- 
den," the bines being trained upon a wire trellis. 

A lovely ride was that from l!^ew Norfolk to the Pan- 
shanger salmon-ponds, where the acclimatization of the En- 
glish fish has lately been attempted. The track, now cut 
along the river cliff, now lost in the mimosa scrub, offers a 



850 Greater Britain. 

succession of prospects, each more charming than the one be- 
fore it ; and that from the ponds themselves is a repetition 
of the view along the vale of the Towy, from Steele's house 
near Caermarthen. Trout of a foot long, and salmon of an 
inch, rewarded us (in the spirit) for our ride, but we were 
called on to express our belief in the statement that salmon 
" returned from the sea " have lately been seen in the river. 

Father , the Catholic parish priest, " that saw 'em," is 

the hero of the day^id his past experiences upon the Shan- 
non are quoted as testimonies to the infallibility in fish ques- 
tions. My hosts of New ISTorfolk had their fears lest the 
reverend gentleman should be lynched if it were finally 
proved that he had been mistaken. 

The salmon madness will at least have two results: the 
catalogue of indigenous birds will be reduced to a blank 
sheet, for every wretched Tasmanian bird that never saw a 
salmon egg in all its life is shot down and nailed to a post 
for fear it should eat the ova ; and the British wasp will be 
acclimatized in the southern hemisphere. One is known to 
have arrived in the last box of ova, and to have survived 
with apparent cheerfulness his 100 days in ice. Happy fel- 
low, to cross the line in so cool a fashion ! 

The chief drawbacks to Tasmanian picnics and excursions 
are the snakes, which are as numerous throughout the island 
as they are round Sydney. One of the convicts in a letter 
home once wrote : " Parrots is as thick as crows, and snakes 
is very bad, fourteen to sixteen feet long;" but in sober 
truth the snakes are chiefly small. 

The wonderful " snake stories " that in the colonial papers 
take the place of the English " triple birth " and " gigantic 
gooseberry " are all written in vacation-time by the students 
at Melbourne University, but a true one that I heard in 
Hobarton is too good to be lost. The chief-justice of the 
island, who in his leisure time is an amateur naturalist, and 
collects specimens for European collections in his walks, told 
me that it was his practice, after killing a snake, to carry it 
into Hobarton tied to a stick by a double lashing. A few 
days before my visit, on entering his hall, where an hour be- 
fore he had hung his stick with a rare snake in readiness for 
the Government naturalist, he found to his horror that the 



Confederation. 851 

viper had been only scotched, and that he had made nse of 
his regained life to free himself from the string which con- 
fined his head and neck. He was still tied by the tail, so he 
was swinging to and fro, or " squirming around," as some 
Americans would say, with open mouth and protruded tongue. 
When lassoing with a piece of twine had been tried in vain, 
my friend fetched a gun, and succeeded in killing the snake 
and much damaging the stone-work of his vestibule. 

After a week's sojourn in the neighborhood of Hobarton 
I again crossed the island, but this time by a night of pierc- 
ing moonlight such as can be witnessed only in the dry air 
of the far south. High in the heavens and opposite the moon 
was the solemn constellation of the Southern Cross, sharp- 
ly relieved upon the pitchy background of the Magellanic 
clouds, while the weird-tinted stars which vary the night-sky 
of the southern hemisphere stood out from the blue firmament 
elsewhere. The next day I was again in Melbourne. 



CHAPTER XL 

CONFEDEEATI0N-. 

Melbouene is unusually gay, for at a shapely palace in 
the centre of the city the second great Intercolonial Exhibi- 
tion is being held, and, as its last days are drawing to their 
close, fifty thousand people — «, great number for the colonies 
— visit the building every week. There are exhibitors from 
each of our seven southern colonies, and from French New 
Caledonia, N'etherlandish India, and the Mauritius. It is 
strange to remember now that in the colonization both of 
New Zealand and of Australia we were the successful rivals 
of the French only after having been behind them in awaken- 
ing to the advisability of an occupation of those countnes. 
In the case of New Zealand the French fleet was anticipated 
three several times by the forethought and decision of our 
naval officers on the station, and in the case of Australia the 
whole south coast was actually named " La Terre Napoleon," 
and surveyed for colonization by Captain Baudin in 1800. 
New Caledonia, on the other hand, was named and occupied 
by ourselves, and afterward abandoned to the French. 



852 Greater Britain. 

The pre&ent remarkable exhibition of the products of the 
Australias, coming just at the time when the border customs 
between Victoria and New South Wales have been abolished 
by agreement, and when all seems to point to the formation 
of a customs union between the colonies, leads men to look 
still farther forward, and to expect confederation. It is 
worthy of notice at this conjuncture that the Australian Pro- 
tectionists, as a rule, refuse to be protected against their im- 
mediate neighbors, just as those of America protect the man- 
ufactures of the Union rather than of single States. They 
tell us that they can point, with regard to Europe, to pauper 
labor, but that they have no case as against the sister colo- 
nies ; they wish, they say, to obtain a wide market for the sale 
of the produce of each colony ; the nationality they would 
create is to be Australian, not provincial. 

Already there is postal union and a partial customs union, 
and confederation itself, however distant in fact, has been 
very lately brought about in the spirit by the efforts of the 
London press, one well-known paper having three times in a 
single article called the Governor of J^ew South Wales by 
the sounding title of " Governor-general of the Australasian 
Colonies," to which he has, of course, not the faintest claim. 

There are many difficulties in the way of confederation. 
The leading merchants and squatters of Victoria are in fa- 
vor of it ; but not so those of the poorer or less populous 
colonies, where there is much •fear of being swamped. The 
costliness of the Federal Gove^ment of l^ew Zealand is a 
warning against over-hasty confederation. Victoria, too, 
would probably insist upon the exclusion of West Australia, 
on account of her convict population. The continental theo- 
ry is undreamt of by Australians, owing to their having al- 
ways been inhabitants of comparatively small States, and 
not, like dwellers in the organized Territories of America, po- 
tentially citizens of a vast and homogeneous empire. 

The choice of capital will, here as in Canada, be a matter 
of peculiar difficulty. It' is to be hoped by all lovers of free- 
dom that some hitherto unknown village will be selected. 
There is in all great cities a strong tendency to Imperialism. 
Bad pavement, much noise, narrow lanes, blockaded streets, 
all these things are ill dealt with by free government, we are 



Confederation. 853 

told. Englishmen wlio have been in Paris, Americans who 
know St. Petersburg, forgetting that without the Emperor 
the Prefet is impossible, cry out that London, that New 
York, in their turn, need a Haussmann. In this tendency- 
lies a terrible danger to Free States — a danger avoided, how- 
ever, or greatly lessened, by the seat of the Legislature be- 
ing placed, as in Canada and the United States, far away 
from the great cities. Were Melbourne to become the seat 
of government, nothing could prevent the distant colonies 
from increasing the already gigantic power of that city by 
choosing her merchants as their representatives. 

The bearing of confederation upon imperial interests is a 
more simple matter. Although union will tend to the earli- 
er independence of the colonies, yet, if federated, they are 
more likely to be a valuable ally than they could be if re- 
mainmg so many separate countries. They would also be a 
stronger enemy ; but distance will make all their wars naval, 
and a strong fleet would be more valuable to us as a friend 
than dangerous as an enemy, unless in the case of a coalition 
against us, in Avhich it would probably not be the interest of 
Australia to join. 

From the colonial point of view, federation would tend to 
secure to the Australians better general and local govern- 
ment than they possess at present. It is absurd to expect 
that colonial governors should be upon good terms with 
their charges when we shift men every four years — say from 
Demerara to ^NTew South Wales, or from Jamaica to Victo- 
ria. The unhappy governor loses half a year in moving to 
his post, and a couple of years in coming to understand the 
circumstances of his new province, and then settles down to 
be successful in the ruling of educated whites under demo- 
cratic institutions only if he can entirely throw aside the 
whole of his exjDerience, derived as it will probably have 
been from the despotic sway over blacks. We never can 
have a set of colonial governors fit for Australia until the 
Australian governments are made a distinct service, and en- 
tirely separated from those of the West Indies, of Africa, 
and Hons^ Konoj. 

Besides improving the Government, confederation would 
lend to every colonist the dignity derived from citizenship 



354 Geeater Britain. 

of a great country — a point the importance of which will not 
be contested by any one who has been in America since the 
war. 

It is not easy to resist the conclusion that confederation 
is in every way desirable. If it leads to independence we 
must say to the Australians what Houmai ta Whiti -said in 
his great speech to the progenitors of the Maori race when 
they were quitting Hawaiki : " Depart, and dwell in peace ; 
let there be no quarrelling among you, but build up a great 
people." 



CHAPTER Xn. 

ADELAIDE. 

The capital of South Australia is reputed the hottest of 
all the cities that are chiefly inhabited by the English race, 
and as I neared it through the Backstairs Passage into the 
Gulf of St. Vincent, past Kangaroo Island, and still more when 
I landed at Glenelg, I came to the conclusion that its reputa- 
tion was deserved. The extreme heat which characterizes 
South Australia is to some extent a consequence of its lying 
as far north as I^ew South Wales and Queensland, and so far 
inland as to escape the breeze by which their coasts are vis- 
ited ; for although by " South Australia " we should, in the 
southern hemisphere, naturally understand that portion of 
Australia which was farthest from the tropics, yet it is a 
curious fact that the whole colony of Victoria is to the south 
of Adelaide, and that nearly all the northernmost points of 
the continent now lie within the country misnamed " South 
Australia." 

The immense northern territory, being supposed to be 
valueless, has generously been handed over to South Austra- 
lia, which thus becomes the widest of all British colonies, 
and nearly as large as English Hindostan. If the present 
great expenditure succeeds in causing the discovery of any 
good land at the north, it will of course at once be made a 
separate colony. The only important result that seems like- 
ly to follow from this annexation of the northern territory 
to South Australia is that the school-boys' geography will 



Adelaide. 855 

suffer ; one would expect, indeed, that a total destruction of 
all principle in the next generation will be the inevitable re- 
sult of so rude a blow to confidence in books and masters as 
the assurance from a teacher's lips that the two most remote 
countries of Australia are united under one Colonial Govern- 
ment, and that the northernmost points of the whole conti- 
nent are situated in South Australia. Boys will probably 
conclude that, across the line, south becomes north and north 
south, and that in Australia the sun rises in the west. 

Instead of gold, wheat, sheep, as in Victoria, the staples 
here are wheat, sheep, copper ; and my introduction to South 
Australia was characteristic of the colony, for I found in 
Port Adelaide, where I first set foot, not only every store 
filled to overflowing, but piles of wheat-sacks in the road- 
ways, and the lines of wheat-cars on the sidings of railways, 
without even a tarpaulin to cover the grain. 

Of all the mysteries of commerce, those that concern the 
wheat and flour trade are, perhaps, the strangest to the un- 
initiated. Breadstuffs are still sent from California and Chili 
to Victoria, yet from Adelaide, close at hand, wheat is being 
sent to Ensfland and flour to N'ew York ! 

There can be no doubt but that ultimately Victoria and 
Tasmania will at least succeed in feeding themselves. It is 
probable that neither !N'ew Zealand nor Queensland will find 
it to their interest to do the like. Wool-growing in the 
former and cotton and wool in the latter will continue to pay 
better than wheat in the greater portion of their lands. 
Their granary, and that possibly of the city of Sidney itself, 
will be found in South Australia, especially if land capable of 
carrying wheat be discovered to the westward of the settle- 
ments about Adelaide. That the Australias, Chili, Califor- 
nia, Oregon, and other Pacific States can ever export largely 
of wheat to Europe is more than doubtful. If manufactures 
spring up on this side the world, these countries, whatever 
their fertility, will have at least enough to do to feed them- 
selves. 

As I entered the streets of the " farinaceous village," as 
Adelaide is called by conceited Victorians, I was struck with 
the amount of character they exhibit both in the way of build- 
ings, of faces, and of dress. The South Australians have far 



356 GrKEATER BRITAIN. 

more idea of adapting their houses and clothes to their cli- 
mate than have the people of the other colonies, and their 
faces adapt themselves. The verandas to the shops are suffi- 
ciently close to form a perfect piazza ; the people rise early, 
and water the side-walk in front of their houses ; and you 
never meet a man who does not make some sacrifice- to the 
heat in the shape of puggree, silk coat, or sun-helmet ; but 
the women are nearly as unwise here as in the other colonies, 
and persist in going about in shawls and colored dresses. 
Might they but see a few of the Richmond or Baltimore la- 
dies in their pure white muslin frocks, and die of envy, for 
the dress most suited to a hot dry climate is also the most 
beautiful under its bright sun. 

The German element is strong in South Australia, and 
there are whole villages in the wheat-country where English 
is never sjDoken ; but here, as in America, there has been no 
mingling of the races, and the whole divergence from the 
British types is traceable to climatic influences, and especial- 
ly dry heat. The men born here are thin, and fine-featured, 
somewhat like the Pitcairn Islanders, while the women are 
all alike — small, pretty, and bright, but with a burnt-up look. 
The haggard eye might, perhaps, be ascribed to the dreaded 
presence of my old friend of the Rocky Mountains, the brulot 
sand-fly. The inhabitants of all hot, dry countries speak 
from the head, and not the chest, and the English in Austra- 
lia are acquiring this habit ; you seldom find a " corn-stalk " 
who speaks well from the chest. 

The air is crisp and hot — crisper and hotter even than that 
of Melbourne. The shaded thermometer upon the Victorian 
coast seldom reaches 110°, but in the town of Adelaide 117° 
has been recorded by the Government astronomer. Such is 
the figure of the Australian continent that Adelaide, although 
a sea-port town, lies, as it were, inland. Catching the heated 
gales from three of the cardinal points, Adelaide has a sum- 
mer six months long, and is exposed to a fearful continuance 
of hot winds; nevertheless 105° at Adelaide is easier borne 
than 95° in the shade at Sydney. 

Nothing can be prettier than the outskirts of the capital. 
In laying out Adelaide its founders have reserved a park 
about a quarter of a mile in width all round the city. This 



Adelaide. 357 

gives a charming drive nine miles long, outside which again 
are the olive-yards and villas of the citizens. Hedges of the 
yellow cactus, or of the graceful Kangaroo Island acacia, 
bound the gardens, and the pomegranate, magnolia, fig, and 
aloe grow upon every lawn. Five miles to the eastward are 
the cool wooded hills of the Mount Lofty range, on the tops 
of which are grown the English fruits for which the plains 
afibrd no shade or moisture. 

Crossing the Adelaide plains, for fifty miles by railway, 
to Kapunda, I beheld one great wheat-field without a break. 
The country was finer than any stretch of equal extent in 
California or Victoria, and looked as though the crops were 
" standing " — which in one sense they were, though the grain 
Avas long since "in." The fact is, that they use the Ridley 
machines, by which the ears are thrashed out without any 
cutting of the straw, which continues to stand, and is finally 
plowed in at the farmer's leisure, except in the neighbor- 
hood of Adelaide. There would be a golden age of partridge- 
shooting in Old England did the climate and the price of 
straw allow of the adoption of the Ridley reaper. Under 
this system South Australia grows on the average six times 
as much wheat as she can use, whereas, if reaping had to be 
paid for, she could only grow from one and a half times to 
twice as much as would meet the home demand. 

In this country, as in America, " bad farming " is found 
to pay; for with cheap land, the Ridley reaper and good 
markets, light crops without labor, except the peasant-pro- 
prietor's own toil, pay well when heavy crops obtained by 
the use of hired labor would not reimburse the capitalist. 
The amount of land under cultivation has been trebled in the 
last seven years, and half a million acres are now under 
wheat. South Australia has this year produced seven times 
as much grain as she can consume, and twelve acres are un- 
der wheat for every adult male of the population of the 
colony. 

A committee has been lately sitting in Kew South Wales 
" to consider the state of the colony." To judge from the 
evidence taken before it, the members seemed to have con- 
ceived that their task Avas to inquire why South Australia 
prospered above New South Wales. Frugality of the peo- 



358 Greater Britain. 

pie, especially of the Germans, and fertility of the soil were 
the reasons which they gave for the result ; but it is impossi- 
ble not to see that the success of South. Australia is but an- 
other instance of the triumph of small proprietors, of whom 
there are now some seven or eight thousand in the colony, 
and who were brought here by the adoption of the Wake- 
field land system. 

In the early days of the colony land was sold at a good 
price in 130-acre sections, with one acre of town-land to each 
agricultural section. Now, under rules made at home, but 
confirmed after the introduction of self-government, land is 
sold by auction, with a reserved price of £1 an acre, but 
when once a block has passed the hammer it can forever be 
taken up at £1 the acre without further competition. The 
Land Fund is kept separate from the other revenue, and a 
few permanent charges, such as that for the aborigines, be- 
ing paid out of it, the remainder is divided into three por- 
tions, of which two are destined for public works and one 
for immigration. 

There is a marvellous contrast to be drawn between the 
success which has attended the Wakefield, system in South 
Australia and the total failure, in the neighboring colony of 
West Australia, of the old system, under which, vast tracts 
of land being alienated for small prices to the Crown, there 
remains no fund for introducing that abundant supply of 
labor without which the land is useless. 

Adelaide is so distant from Europe that no immigrants 
come of themselves, and, in the assisted importation of both 
men and women, the relative proportions of English, Scotch, 
and Irish that exist at home are carefully preserved, by 
which simple precaution the colony is saved from an organic 
change of type, such as that which threatens all America, 
although it would, of course, be idle to deny that the restric- 
tion is aimed against the Irish. 

The greatest difficulty of young countries lies in the want 
of women ; not only is this a bar to the natural increase of 
population, it is a deficiency preventive of permanency, de- 
structive of religion ; where woman is not, there can be no 
home, no country. 

How to obtain a supply of marriageable girls is a question 



Adelaide. 859 

which Canada, Tasmania, South Australia, and New South 
Wales have each in their turn attempted to solve by the ar- 
tificial introduction of Irish work-house girls. The difficulty 
apparently got rid of, we begin to find that it is not so much 
as fairly seen; we Lave yet to look it "squarely" in the 
face. The point of the matter is that we should find not 
girls, but honest gu^ls — not women merely, but women fit to 
bear families in a free State. 

One of the colonial superintendents, writing of a lately-re- 
ceived batch of Irish work-house girls, has said that, if these 
are the. " well-conducted girls, he should be curious to see a 
few of the evil-disposed." While in South Australia, I read 
the details of the landing of a similar party of women, from 
Limerick work-house, one Sunday afternoon at Point Levi, 
the Lambeth of Quebec. Although supplied by the city au- 
thorities with meat and drink, and ordered to leave for Mon- 
treal at early morning, nothing could be more' abominable 
than their conduct in the mean while. They sold baggage, 
bonnets, combs, cloaks, and scarfs, keeping on nothing but 
their crinolines and senseless finery. With the pence they 
thus collected they bought corn-whisky, and in a few hours 
were yelling, fighting, swearing, wallowing in beastly drunk- 
enness ; and by the time the authorities came down to pack 
them off by train they were as fiends, mad with rum and 
whisky. At five in the morning they reached the Catholic 
Home at Montreal, where the pious nuns were shocked and 
horrified at their grossness of conduct and lewd speech; 
nothing should force them, they declared, ever again to take 
into their peaceable asylum the Irish work-house girls. This 
was no exceptional case: the rej)orts from South Australia, 
from Tasmania, can show as bad ; and in Canada such con- 
duct on the part of the freshly-landed girls is common. A 
Tasmania magistrate has stated in evidence before a Parlia- 
mentary Committee that once when his wife was in ill health 
he went to one of the immigration offices and applied for a 
decent woman to attend on a sick lady. The woman was 
sent down, and found next day in her room lying on the bed 
in a state best pictured in her own words : " Here I am with 
my yard of clay, blowing a cloud, you say." 

It is evident that a batch of thoroughly bad girls cost a 



360 Greater Britain. 

colony from first to last, in the way of prisons, hospitals, and 
public morals, ten times as much as would the free passages 
across the seas of an equal number of worthy Irish women, 
free from the work-house taint. Of one of these gangs which 
landed in Quebec not many years ago it has been asserted 
by the immigration superintendents that the traces are visi- 
ble to this day, for wherever the women went, " sin, and 
shame, and death were in their track." The Irish unions 
have no desire in the matter beyond that of getting rid of 
their most abandoned girls ; their interests and those of the 
colonies they supply are diametrically opposed. No inspec- 
tion, no agreements, no supervision can be effective in the 
face of facts like these. The class that the unions can afford 
to send, Canada and Tasmania can not afford to keep. Wom- 
en are sent out with babies in their arms ; no one will take 
them into service, because the children are in the way, and 
in a few weeks they fall chargeable on one of the colonial 
benevolent societies, to be kept till the children grow up or 
the mothers die. Even when the girls are not so wholly 
vicious as to be useless in service they are utterly ignorant 
of every thing they ought to know. Of neither domestic 
nor farm-work have they a grain of knowledge. Of thirteen 
who were lately sent to an up-country town but one knew 
how to cook, or wash, or milk, or iron, while three of them 
had agreed to refuse employment unless they were engaged 
to serve together. The agents are at their wits' ends ; either 
the girls are so notoriously infamous in their ways of life 
that no one will hire them, or else they are so extravagant 
in their new-found " independence " that they on their side 
will not be hired. Meanwhile the Irish authorities lay every 
evil upon the long sea-voyage. They say that they select 
the best of girls, but that a few days at sea suffice to de- 
moralize them. 

The colonies could not do better than combine for the es- 
tablishment of a new and more efficient emigration agency 
in Ireland. To avoid the evil, by as far as possible refusing 
to meet it face to face. South Australia has put restrictions 
on her Irish immigration ; for there as in America it is found 
that the Scotch and Germans are the best of immigrants. 
The Scotch are not more successful in Adelaide than every- 



Adelaide. 861 

where in the known world. Half the most prominent among 
the statesmen of the Canadian Confederation, of Victoria, 
and of Queensland are born Scots, and all the great mer- 
chants of India are of the same nation. Whether it be that 
the Scotch emigrants are for the most part men of better 
education than those of other nations, of whose citizens only 
the poorest and most ignorant are known to emigrate, or 
whether the Scotchman owes his uniform success in every 
climate to his perseverance or his shrewdness, the fact re- 
mains, that wherever abroad you come across a Scotchman 
you invariably find him prosperous and respected. 

The Scotch emigrant is a man who leaves Scotland be- 
cause he wishes to rise faster and higher than he can at 
home, whereas the emigrant Irishman quits Gal way or Coun- 
ty Cork only because there is no longer food or shelter for 
him there. The Scotchman crosses the seas in calculating 
contentment ; the Irishman in sorrow and despair. 

At the Burra Burra and Kapunda copper mines there is 
not much to see, so my last days in South Australia were 
given to the political life of the colony, which present one 
singular feature. For the elections to the Council or Upper 
House, for which the franchise is a freehold worth £50, or a 
leasehold of £20 a year, the whole country forms but a single 
district, and the majority elect their men. In a country 
where party feeling runs high, such a system would evident- 
ly unite almost all the evils conceivable in a plan of repre- 
sentation, but in a peaceful colony it undoubtedly works 
well. Having absolute power in their hands, the majority 
here, as in the selection of a governor for an American State, 
use their position with great prudence, and make choice of 
the best men that the country can produce. The franchise 
for the Lower House, for the elections to which the colony 
is " districted," is the simple one of six months' residence, 
which with the ballot works irreproachably. 

The day that I left Adelaide was also that upon which 
Captain Cadell, the opener of the Murray to trade, sailed 
with his naval expedition to fix upon a capital for the North- 
ern territory, that coast of tropical Australia which faces the 
Moluccas. As Governor Gilpin had pressed me to stay, he 
pressed me to go with him, making as an inducement a 

Q 



862 Greater Britain. 

promise to name after me either " a city " or a headland. 
He said he should advise me to select the headland, because 
that would remain, whereas the city probably would not. 
When I pleaded that he had no authority to carry passen- 
gers, he offered to take me as his surgeon. Hitherto the ex- 
peditions have discovered nothing but natives, mangroves, 
alligators, and sea-slugs ; and the whole of the money re- 
ceived from capitalists at home, for 300,000 acres of land to 
be surveyed and handed over to them in !N^orth Australia, 
being now exhausted, the Government are seriously thinking 
of reimbursing the investors and giving up the search for 
land. It would be as cheap to colonize equatorial Africa 
from Adelaide, as tropical Australia. If the Northern terri- 
tory is ever to be rendered habitable, it must be by Queens- 
land that the work is done. 

It is not certain that ISTorth Australia may not be found 
to yield gold in plenty. In a little-known manuscript of the 
seventeenth century the north-west of Australia is called 
" The Land of Gold ;" and we are told that the fishermen of 
Solor, driven on to this land of gold by stress of weather, 
picked up in a few hours their boat full of gold nuggets, and 
returned in safety. They never dared repeat their voyage, 
on account of their dread of the unknown seas ; but Manoel 
Godinho de Eredia was commissioned by the Portuguese 
Lord Admiral of India to explore this gold land, and enrich 
the Crown of Portugal by the capture of the treasures it 
contained. It would be strange enough if gold came to be 
discovered on the north-west coast in the spot from which 
the Portuguese reported their discovery. 

By dawn, after one of the most stifling of Australian 
nights, I left Port Adelaide for King George's Sound. A 
long narrow belt of a clear red-yellow light lay glowing 
along the horizon to the east, portending heat and drought; 
elsewhere the skies were of a deep blue-black. As we steam- 
ed past Kangaroo Island, and through Investigator Straits, 
the sun shot up from the tawny plains, and the hot wind from- 
the northern desert, rising on a sudden after the stillness of 
the night, whirled clouds of sand over the surface of the bay. 



Teansportation. 863 



CHAPTER XIII. 

T K A N S P O K T A T I O T^. 

After. five days' steady steaming across the great Aus- 
tralian bight, north of which lies the true " Terra Australis 
incognita," I reached King George's Sound — " Le Port du 
Roi Georges en Australie," as I saw it written on a letter in 
the jail. At the shore-end of a great land-locked harbor the 
little houses of bright white stone that make up the town 
of Albany peep out from among geranium-covered rocks. 
The climate, unlike that of the greater portion of Australia, 
is damp and tropical, and the dense scrub is a mass of flower- 
ing bushes, with bright blue and scarlet blooms and curious- 
ly-cut leaves. 

The contrast between the scenery and the people of West 
Australia is great indeed. The aboriginal inhabitants of Al- 
bany were represented by a tribe of filthy natives — tall, half- 
starved, their heads bedaubed with red ochre, and their faces 
smeared with yellow clay ; the " colonists " by a gang of 
fiend-faced convicts working in chains upon the esplanade, 
and a group of scowling expirees hunting a monkey with 
bull-dogs on the pier; while the native women, half clothed 
in tattered kangaroo-skins, came slouching past with an as- 
pect of defiant wretchedness. Work is never done in West 
Australia unless under the compulsion of the lash, for a sim- 
ilar degradation of labor is produced by the use of convicts 
as by that of slaves. 

Settled at an earlier date than was South Australia ; 
West Australia, then called Swan River, although one of the 
oldest of the colonies, was so soon ruined by the free gift 
to the first settlers of vast territories useless without labor 
that in 1849 she petitioned tp be made a penal settlement, 
and though at the instance of Victoria transportation to the 
Australias has now all but ceased, Freemantle Prison is still 
the most considerable convict establishment we possess 
across the seas. 



864 Greatee Britatn. 

At the time of my visit there were 10,000 convicts or 
emancipists within the " colony," of whom 1500 were in 
prison, 1500 in private service on tickets-of-leave, while 1500 
had served out their time, and over 5000 had been released 
upon conditional pardons. 600 of the convicts had arrived 
from England in 1865. Out of a total population, free and 
convict, of 20,000, the offenders in the year had numbered 
nearly 3500, or more than one-sixth of the people, counting 
women and childreUo 

If twenty years of convict labor seem to have done but 
little for the settlement, they have at least enabled us to 
draw the moral that transportation and free immigration can 
not exist side by side : the one element must overbear and 
destroy the other. In Western Australia the convicts and 
their keepers form t wo-thirds of the whole population, and 
the district is a great English prison, not a colony, and ex- 
ports but a little wool, a little sandal-wood, and a little cot- 
ton. 

Western Australia is as unpoj)ular with the convicts as 
with free settlers : fifty or sixty convicts have successfully 
escaped from the settlement within the last few years. From 
twenty to thirty escapes take place annually, but the men 
are usually recaptured within a month or two, although shel- 
tered by the people, the vast majority of whom are ticket-of- 
leave men or ex-convicts. Absconders receive a hundred 
lashes and one year in the chain-gang, yet from sixty to sev- 
enty unsuccessful attempts are reported every year. 

On the road between Albany and Hamilton I saw a man 
at work in ponderous irons. The sun was striking dov/n on 
him in a way that none can fancy who have no experience 
of Western Australia or Bengal, and his labor was of the 
heaviest ; now he had to prize up huge rocks with a crow- 
bar, now to handle pick and shovel, now to use the rammer, 
under the eye of an armed warder, who idled in the shade 
by the road-side. This was an " escape-man," thus treated 
with a view to cause him to cease his continual endeavors to 
get away from Albany. No wonder that the " chain-gang " 
system is a failure, and the number both of attempts and 
actual escapes larger under it than before the introduction 
of this tremendous punishment. 



Transportation. 865 

Many of the " escapes " are made with no other view than 
to obtain a momentary change of scene. On the last retnrn 
trip of the ship in which I sailed from Adelaide to King 
George's Sound a convict coal-man was found built up in the 
coal-heap on deck : he and ^is mates at Albany had drawn 
lots to settle which of them should be thus packed off by 
the help of the others " for a change." Of ultimate escape 
there could be no chance ; the coal on deck 'could not fail to 
be exhausted within a day or two after leaving port, and 
this they knew. When he emerged, black, half-smothered, 
and nearly starved, from his hiding-place, he allowed himself 
to be quietly ironed, and so kept till the ship reached Ade- 
laide; when he was given up to the authorities, and sent back 
to Albany for punishment. Acts of this class: are common 
enough to have received a name. The offenders are called 
" bolters for a change." 

A convict has been known, when marching in his gang, 
suddenly to lift up his spade and split the skull of the man 
who walked in front of him, thus courting a certain death 
for no reason but to escape from the monotony of toil. An- 
other has doubled his punishment for fun by calling out to 
the magistrates : " Gentlemen, pray remember that I am en- 
titled to an iron-gang, because this is the second time of my 
absconding^" 

One of the strangest things about the advance of England 
is the many-sided character of the form of early settlement : 
Central North America we plant with Mormons, New Zea- 
land with the runaways of our whaling-ships, Tasmania and 
portions of Australia with our transported felons. Trans- 
portation has gone through many phases since the system 
took its rise in the exile to the colonies under Charles 11. of 
the moss-troopers of Northumberland. The plan of forcing 
the exiles to labor as slaves on the plantations was introduced 
in the reign of George II., and by an act then passed offend- 
ers were actually put up to auction, and knocked down to 
men who undertook to transport them, and make what they 
could of their labor. In 1786 an Order in Council named 
the eastern coast of Australia and the adjacent islands as the 
spot to which transportation beyond the seas should be di- 
rectedj and in 1787 the black bar was drawn indelibly across 



S66 Gkeater Britain. 

the page of history which records the foundation of the col- 
ony of New South Wales. From that time to the present 
day the Avorld has witnessed the portentous sight of great 
countries in which the major portion of the people, the whole 
of the handicraftsmen, are convicted felons. 

There being no free people whatever in the " colonies " 
when first formed, the governors had no choice but to aj)point 
convicts to all the official situations. The consequence was 
robbery and corruption. Recorded sentences were altered 
by the convict clerks, free pardons and grants of land were 
sold for money. The convict overseers forced their gangmen 
to labor not for Government, but for themselves, securing se- 
crecy by the unlimited supply of rum to the men, who in 
turn bought native women with all that they could spare. 
On the sheep-stations whole herds were stolen, and those from 
neighboring lands driven in to show on muster-days. Enor- 
mous fortunes were accumulated by some of the emanci- 
pists, by fraud and infamy rather than by prudence, we are 
told, and a vast number of convicts were soon at large in 
Sydney town itself, without the knowledge of the police. 
As the settlements waxed in years and size, the sons of con- 
vict parents grew up in total ignorance, while such few free 
settlers as arrived — " the ancients," as they were styled, or 
" the ancient nobility of Botany Bay " — were wholly depend- 
ent on convict tutors for the education of their children — the 
" coi-n-stalks " and " currency girls ;" and cock-fighting was 
the chief amusement of both sexes. The newspapers were 
without exception conducted by gentlemen convicts, or " spe- 
cials," as they were called, who were assigned to the editors 
for that purpose, and the police force itself was composed of 
ticket-of-leave men and " emancipists." Conidcts were thus 
the only school-masters, the only governesses, the only nurses, 
the only journalists, and, as there were even convict clergy- 
men and convict university professors, the training of the 
youth of the land was committed almost exclusively to the 
felon's care. 

A petition sent home from Tasmania in 1848 is simple 
and pathetic ; it is from the parents and guardians resident 
in Yan Diemen's Land. They set forth that there are 13,000 
children growing up in the colony, that within six years alone 



Transportation. 8^7 

24,000 convicts have been turned into the island, and of 
these but 4000 women. The result is that their children are 
brought up in the midst of profligacy and degradation. 

The lowest depth of villainy, if in such universal infamy 
degrees can be conceived, was to be met with in the parties 
working in the " chain-gangs " on the roads. " Assignees " 
too bad even for the whip of the harshest, or the " beef and 
beer " of the most lenient master, brutalized still further, if 
that were possible, by association with those as vile as them- 
selves, and followed about the country by women too infa- 
mous even for service in the houses of the up-country settlers 
or in "the gin-palaces of the towns, worked in gangs upon the 
roads by day, whenever promises of spirits or the hope of to- 
bacco could induce them to work at all, and. found a compen- 
sation for such unusual toil in nightly quitting their camp, and 
traversing the country, robbing and murdering those they 
met, and sacking every homestead that lay in their track. 

The clerk in charge of one of the great convict barracks 
was himself a convict, and had an understanding with the 
men under his care that they might prowl about at night 
and rob, on condition that they should share their gains with 
him, and that, if they were found out, he should himself pros- 
ecute them for being absent without leave. Juries were com- 
posed either of convicts or of publicans dependent on the 
convicts for their livelihood, and convictions were of neces- 
sity extremely rare. In a plain case of murder the judge was 
known to say, " If I don't attend to the recommendation to 
mercy these fellows will never find a man guilty again;" 
and jurymen would frequently hand down notes to the coun- 
sel for the defense, and bid him give himself no trouble, as 
they intended to acquit their friend. 

The lawyers were mostly convicts, and perjury in the 
courts was rife. It has been given in evidence before a Roy- 
al Commission by a magistrate of N'ew South Wales that a 
Sydney free immigrant once had a tailor's bill sent in which 
he did not owe, he having been but a few weeks in the colony. 
He instructed a lawyer, and did not himself appear in court. 
He afterward heard that he had won his case, for the tailor 
had sworn to the bill, but the immigrant's lawyer, " to save 
trouble," had called a witness who swore to having paid it, 



8^8 Greater Britain. 

which settled the case. Sometimes there were not only con- 
vict witnesses and convict jurors, but convict judges. 

The assignment system was supposed to be a great im- 
provement upon the jail, but its only certain result was that 
convict master and convict man used to get drunk together, 
while a night never passed without a burglary in Sydney. 
Many of the convicts' mistresses went out from England as 
Government free emigrants, taking with them funds sub- 
scribed by the thieves at home and money obtained by the 
robberies for which their "fancy men" had been convicted, 
and on their arrival at Sydney succeeded in getting their 
paramours assigned to them as convict servants. Such was 
the disparity of the sexes that the term " wife " was a mock- 
ery, and the Female Emigration Society and the Govern- 
ment vied with each other in sending out to Sydney the 
worst women in all London to re-enforce the ranks of the 
convict girls of the Paramatta factory. Even among the 
free settlers marriage soon became extremely rare. Convicts 
were at the head of the colleges and benevolent asylums ; 
the custom-house oflS.cials were all convicts ; one of the oc- 
cupants of the office of attorney-general took for his clerk a 
notorious convict, who was actually re-committed to Bath- 
urst after his appointment, and yet allowed to return to Syd- 
ney and resume his duties. 

The most remarkable peculiarity of the assignment sys- 
tem was its gross uncertainty. Some assigned convicts 
spent their time working for high wages, living and drink- 
ing with their masters ; others were mere slaves. Whether, 
however, he be in practice well or ill treated, in the assign- 
ment or apprenticeship system the convict is, under whatever 
name, a slave, subject to the caprice of a master who, though 
he can not himself flog his " servant," can have him flogged 
by writing a note or sending his compliments to his neigh- 
bor the magistrate on the next run or farm. The "whip- 
ping-houses " of Mississippi and Alabama had their parallel 
in iN'ew South Wales ; a look or word would cause the hur- 
rying of the servant to the post or the forge as a prelimina- 
ry to a month in the chain-gang " on the roads." On the 
other hand, under the assignment system nothing can pre- 
vent skilled convict workmen being paid and pampered by 



Teanspoetation. 869 

their masters, whose interest it evidently becomes to get out 
of them all the work possible by excessive indulgence, as in- 
telligent labor can not be produced through the machinery 
of the whipping-post, but may be through that of " beef and 
beer." 

Whatever may have been the true interest of the free set-si 
tiers, cruelty was in practice commoner than indulgence. 
Fifty and a hundred lashes, months of solitary confinement, 
years of labor in chains on the roads, were laid upon convicts 
for such petty offenses as brawling, drunkenness, and diso- 
bedience. In 1835, among the 28,000 convicts then in New 
South Wales, there were 22,000 summary convictions for dis- 
orderly or dishonest conduct, and in a year the average was 
3000 floggings and above 100,000 lashes. In Tasmania, 
where the convicts then numbered 15,000, the summary con- 
victions were 15,000, and the lashes 50,000 a year. 

The criminal returns of Tasmania and New South Wales 
contain the condemnation of the transportation system. In 
the single year of 1834 one-seventh of the free population 
of Van Diemen's Land were summarily convicted of drunk- 
enness. In that year, in a population of 37,000, 15,000 were 
convicted before the courts for various offenses. Over a 
hundred persons a year were at that time sentenced to death 
in New South Wales alone. Less than a fourth of the con- 
victs served their time without incurring additional punish- 
ment from the police, but those who thus escaped proved in 
after-life the worst of all, and even Government officials were 
forced into admitting that transportation demoralized far 
more persons than it reformed. Hundreds of assignM con- 
victs made their escape to the back country, and became 
bush-rangers ; many got down to the coast, and crossed to 
the Pacific islands, whence they spread the infamies of New 
South Wales throughout all Polynesia. A Select Commit- 
tee of the House of Commons reported, in words characteris- 
tic of our race, that these convicts committed, in New Zea- 
land and the Pacific, " outrages at which humanity shud- 
ders," and which were to be deplored as being " injurious to 
our commercial interests in that quarter of the globe." 

Transportation to New South Wales came to its end none 
too soon ; in fifty years 75,000 convicts had been transport- 

Q2 



870 Greater Britain. 

ed to that colony, and 30,000 to the little Island of Tasmania 
in twenty years. 

Were there no other argument for the discontimiance of 
transportation, it. would be almost enough to say that the 
life in the convict-ship itself makes the reformation of trans- 
ported criminals impossible. Where many bad men are 
brought together, the few not wholly corrupt who may be 
among them have no opportunity for speech, and the grain 
of good that may exist in every heart can have no chance 
for life ; if not inclination, pride at least leads the " old hand " 
to put down all acts that are not vile, all words that are not 
obscene.. Those who have sailed in convict company say 
that there is something terrible in the fiendish delight that 
the " old hands "' take in watching the steady degradation of 
the " new chums." The hardened criminals invariably meet 
the less vile with outrage, ridicule, and contempt, and the 
better men soon succumb to ruffians who have crime for their 
profession, and for all their relaxation vice. 

To describe the horrors of the convict-ships, we are told, 
would be impossible. The imagination will scarce suffice to 
call up dreams so hideous. Four months of filthiness in a 
floating hell sink even the least bad to the level of unteach- 
able brutality. Mutiny is unknown ; the convicts are their 
own masters and the ship's, but the shrewd callousness of 
the old jail-bird teaches all that there is nothing to be gain- 
ed even by momentary success. Rage and violence are sel- 
dom seen, but there is a humor that is worse than blpws— 
conversation that transcends all crime in infamy. 

It will be long before the last traces of convict disease dis- 
appear from Tasmania and New South Wales ; the gold-find 
has done much to purify the air, free selection may lead to a 
still more bright advance, manufacturing may lend its help ; 
but years must go by before Tasmania can be prosperous or 
Sydney moral. Their history is not only valuable as a guide 
to those who have to save West Australia, as General Bourke 
and Mr. Wentworth saved New South Wales, but as an ex- 
ample, not picked from ancient rolls, but from the records 
of a system founded vtdthin the memory of living man, and 
still existent, of what transportation must necessarily be, and 
what it may easily become. 



Transportation. 871 

The results of a dispassionate survey of the transportation 
system in the abstract are far from satisfactory. If deporta- 
tion be considered as a punishment, it would be hard to find a 
worse. Punishment should be equable, reformatory, deter- 
rent, cheap. Transportation is the most costly of all the pun- 
ishments that are known to us ; it is subject to variations that 
can not be guarded against ; it is severest to the least guilty, 
and slightest to the most hardened ; it morally destroys those 
who have some good remaining in them ; it leaves the ruffian- 
ly malefactor worse if possible than it finds him ; and, while it 
is frightfully cruel and vindictive in its character, it is use- 
less as a deterrent because its nature is unknown at home. 
Transportation to the English thief means exile, and nothing 
more ; it is only after conviction, when far away from his un- 
caught associates, that he comes to find it worse than death. 
Instead of deterring, transportation tempts to crime ; instead 
of reforming, it debases the bad, and confirms in villainy the 
already infamous. To every bad man it gives the worst 
companions ; the infamous are to be reformed by association 
with the vile ; while its effects upon the colonies are described 
in every petition of the settlers, and testified to by the whole 
history of our plantations in the antipodes, and by the pres- 
ent condition of West Australia. We have come at last to 
transportation in its most limited and restricted sense; the 
only remaining step is to be quit of it altogether. 

In conjunction with all punishment we should secure some 
means of separating the men one from another as soon as the 
actual punishment is terminated : to settle them on land, to 
settle them with wives where possible, should be our object. 
The work which really has in it something of reformation is 
that which a man has to do, not in order that he may avoid 
whipping, but that he may escape starvation ; and it is from 
this point of view that transportation is defensible. A man, 
however bad, will generally become a useful member of soci- 
ety and a not altogether neglectful father if allowed to set- 
tle upon land away from his old companions ; but morbid 
tendencies of every kind are strengthened by close associa- 
tion with others who are laboring under a like infirmity: 
and where the former convicts are allowed to hang together 
in towns nothing is to be expected better than that which is 



372 Greater Britain. 

actually found — namely, a state of society where wives speed- 
ily become as villainous as their husbands, and where chil- 
dren are brought up to emulate their fathers' crimes. 

To keep the men separate from each other after the expi- 
ration of the sentence, we need to send the convicts to a fair- 
ly populous country, whence arises this great difficulty : if we 
send convicts to a populous colony we are met at once by a 
cry that we are forcing the workmen of the colony into a one- 
sided competition ; that we are offering an unbearable insult 
to the free population ; that, in attempting to reform the fel- 
on by allowing him to be absorbed into the colonial society, 
we are degrading and corrupting the whole community on 
the chance of possible benefit to our English villain. On the 
other hand, if we send our convicts to an uninhabited land, 
such as New South Wales and Tasmania were, such as West 
Australia is now, we build up an artificial Pandemonium, 
whither we convey at the public cost the pick and cream of 
the ruffians of the world, to form a community of which each 
member must be sufficiently vile of himself to corrupt a na- 
tion. 

If by care the difficulty of which I have spoken can be 
avoided transportation might be replaced by short sentences, 
solitary confinement, and low diet, to be followed by forced 
exile, under regulations, to some selected colony, such as the 
Ghauts of Eastern Africa, opposite to Madagascar, or the 
highlands that skirt the Zambesi River. Exile after punish- 
ment may often be the only way of providing for convicts 
who would otherwise be forced to return to their former 
ways. The difficulties in the path of discharged convicts 
seeking employment are too terrible for them not to accept 
joyfully a plan for emigration to a country where they are 
unknown. 

In Western Australia transportation has not been made 
subservient to colonization, and both in consequence have 
failed. 

On going on board the Bombay at King George's Sound, 
I at once found myself in the East. The captain's crew of 
Malays, the native cooks in long white gowns, the Bombay 
serangs in dark-blue turbans, red cummerbunds, and green or 
yellow trowsers ; the negro or Abyssinian stokers ; the pas- 



AUSTEALIA. 873 

sengers in coats of China-grass ; the Hindoo deck-sweepers 
playing on their tomtoms in the intervals of work ; the punk- 
ahs below ; the Hindostanee names for every thing on deck ; 
and, above all, the general indolence of every body, all told 
of a new world. 

A convict clerk superintended the coaling, which took 
place before we left the harbor for Ceylon, and I remarked 
that the dejection of his countenance exceeded that of the 
felon-laborers who worked in irons on the quay. There is a 
wide-spread belief in England that unfair favor is shown to 
" gentlemen convicts." This is simply not the case ; every 
educated prisoner is employed at in-door work, for which he 
is suited, and not at road-making, in which he might be use- 
less ; but there are few cases in which he would not wish to 
exchange a position full of hopeless degradation for that of 
an out-door laborer, who passes through his daily routine 
drudgery (far from the prison) unknown, and perhaps in his 
fancy all but free. The longing to change the mattock for 
the pen is the result of envy, and confined to those who, if 
listened to, would prove incapable of pursuing the pen-driver's 
occupation. 

Under a fair and freshening breeze we left the port of Al- 
bany, happy to escape from a jail the size of India, even those 
of us who had been forced to pass only a few days in West 
Australia. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

AUSTRALIA. 

Pacing the deck with difficulty as the ship tore through 
the lava-covered seas before a favoring gale that caught us 
off Cape Lewin, some of us discussed the projects of the 
great Southland as a whole. 

In Australia, it is often said, we have a second America in 
its infancy ; but it may be doubted whether we have not be- 
come so used to trace the march of empire on a westward 
course, through Persia and Assyria, Greece and Rome, then 
by Germany to England and America, that we are too readily 
prepared to accept the probability of its onward course to 
the Pacific. 



374 Gkeater Britain. 

The progress of Australia has been singularly rapid. In 
1830 her population was under 40,000 ; in 1860 it numbered 
1,500,000 ; nevertheless it is questionable how far the prog- 
ress will continue. The natural conditions of America in 
Australia are exactly reversed. All the best lands of Aus- 
tralia are on her coast, and these are already taken up by 
settlers. Australia has three-quarters the area of Europe, 
but it is doubtful whether she will ever support a dense pop- 
ulation throughout even half her limits. The uses of the 
northern territory have yet to be discovered, and the interior 
of the continent is far from being tempting to the settler. 
Upon the whole, it seems likely that almost all the imperfect- 
ly-known regions of Australia will in time be occupied by pas- 
toral Crown tenants, but that the area of agricultural opera- 
tions is not likely to admit of indefinite extension. The cen- 
tral district of Australia, to the extent, perhaps, of half the 
entire continent, lies too far north for winter rains, too far 
south for tropical wet seasons, and in these vast solitudes ag- 
riculture may be pronounced impossible, sheep-farming diffi- 
cult. There will be no difficulty in retaining in tanks, or rais- 
ing by means of wells sufficient water for sheep and cattle 
stations, and the wool, tallow, and even meat, will be carried 
by those railways for which the country is admirably fitted, 
while the construction of locks upon the Murray and its trib- 
utaries will enable steamers to carry the whole trade of the 
Riverina. So far, all is well, but the arable lands of Austra- 
lia are limited by the rains, and apparently the limit is a sad- 
ly narrow one. 

Once in a while a heavy winter rain falls in the interior ; 
grass springs up, the lagoons are filled, the up-country squat- 
ters make their fortunes, and all goes prosperously for a time. 
Accounts r«ach the coast cities of the astonishing fertility of 
the interior, and hundreds of settlers set off to the remotest 
districts. Two or three years of drought then follow, and 
all the more enterprising squatters are soon ruined, with a 
gain, however, sometimes of a few thousand square miles of 
country to civilization. 

Hitherto the Australians have not made so much as they 
should have done of the country that is within their reach. 
The want of railroads is incredible. There are but some 



Australia. 875 

400 miles of railway in all Australia — far less than the amount 
possessed by the single infant State of Wisconsin. The sums 
spent upon the Victorian lines have deterred the colonists 
from completing their railway system. £10,000,000 sterling 
were spent upon 200 miles of road, through easy country in 
which the land cost nothing. The United States have made 
nearly 40,000 miles of railroad for less than £300,000,000 
sterling ; Canada made her 2000 miles for £20,000,000, or 
ten times as much railroad as Victoria, for only twice the 
money. Cuba has already more miles of railroad than all 
Australia. 

Small as are the inhabited portions of Australia when 
compared with the corresponding divisions of the United 
States, this country nevertheless is huge enough. The part 
of Queensland already peopled is five times larger than the 
United Kingdom. South Australia and West Australia are 
each of them nearly as large as British India, but of these 
colonies the greater part is desert. Fertile Victoria, the size 
of Great Britain, is only a thirty-fourth part of Australia. 

In face of the comparatively small amount of good agri- 
cultural country known to exist in Australia the dispropor- 
tionate size of the great cities shows out more clearly than 
ever. Even Melbourne, when it comes to be examined, has 
too much the air of a magnified Hobarton, of a city with no 
country at its back, of a steam-hammer set up to crack nuts. 
Queensland is at present free from the burden of gigantic 
cities, but then Queensland is subject to the greater danger 
of becoming what is in reality a slave republic. 

Morally and intellectually, at alj. events, the colonies are 
thriving. A literature is springing up, a national character 
is being grafted upon the good English stock. What shape 
the Australian mind will take is at present somewhat doubt- 
ful. In addition to considerable shrewdness and a purely 
Saxon capacity and willingness to combine for local objects, 
we find in Australia an admirable love of simple mirth and 
a serious distaste for prolonged labor in one direction, while 
the downrightness and determination in the pursuit of truth, 
remarkable in America, are less noticeable here. 

The extravagance begotten of the tradition of convict 
times has not been without effect, and the settlers waste an- 



876 Greater Britain. 

nually, it is computed, food wliich would support in Europe 
a population of twice their numbers. This wastefulness is, 
however, in some degree a consequence of the necessary- 
habits of a pastoral people. The 8000 tons of tallow export- 
ed annually by the Australias are said to represent the boil- 
ing down of sheep enough to feed half a million of people for 
a twelvemonth. 

Australian manners, like the American, resemble the 
French rather than the British — a resemblance traceable, 
perhaps, to the essential democracy of Australia, America, 
and France. One surface-point which catches the eye in any 
Australian ball-room or on any race-course is clearly to be 
referj'ed to the habit of mind produced by democracy — the 
fact, namely, that the women dress with great expense and 
care, the men with none whatever. This, as a rule, is true 
o.f Americans, Australians, and French. 

Unlike as are the Australians to the British, there is never- 
theless a singular mimicry of British forms and ceremonies 
in the colonies, which is extended to the most trifling details 
of public life. Twice in Australia was I invited to ministe- 
rial dinners, given to mark the approaching close of the ses- 
sion ; twice also was I present at university celebrations, in 
which home whimsicalities were closely copied. The gov- 
ernors' messages to the Colonial Parliaments are travesties 
of those which custom in England leads us to call "the 
queen's." The very phraseology is closely followed. We 
find Sir J. Manners Sutton gravely saying, " The represent- 
atives of the Government of New South Wales and of my 
Government have agreed to an arrangement on the border 
duties . . ." The " my " in a democratic country like Vic- 
toria strikes a stranger as pre-eminently incongruous, if not 
absurd. 

The imitation of Cambridge forms by the University of 
Sydney is singularly close. One almost expects to see the 
familiar blue gown of the " bull-dog " thrown across the arm 
of the first college servant met within its precincts. Chan- 
cellor, Vice-chancellor, Senate, Syndicates, and even Proc- 
tors, all are here in the antipodes. Registrar, professors, 
" seniors," fees, fines, and " petitions with the University 
seal attached;" "Board of Classical Studies" — the whole 



AUSTEALIA. 877 

corporation sits in borrowed plumage; the very names of 
the colleges are being imitated : we find already a St. John's. 
The Calendar reads like a parody on the volume issued every 
March by Messrs. Deighton. Rules upon matriculation, upon 
the granting of testar)%urs; prize-books stamped with college 
arms are named ; ad eiindem degrees are known ; and we 
have imitations of phraseology even in the announcement of 
prizes to " the most distinguished candidates for honors in 
each of the aforesaid schools," and in the list of subjects for 
the Moral Science tripos. Lent Term, Trinity Term, Mich- 
aelmas Term take the place of the Spring, Summer, and Fall 
Terms of the less pretentious institutions in America, and 
the height of absurdity is reached in the regulations upon 
" academic costume," and on the " respectful salutation " by 
under-graduates of the " fellows and professors " of the Uni- 
versity. The situation on a hot-wind day of a member of 
the Senate, in " black silk gown, with hood of scarlet cloth 
edged with white fur and lined with blue silk, black velvet 
trencher cap," all in addition to his ordinary clothing, it is to 
be presumed, can be imagined only by those who know what 
hot winds are. We English are great acclimatizers : we 
have carried trial by jury to Bengal, tenant-right to Oude, 
and caps and gowns to be worn over loongee and paejama at 
Calcutta University. Who are we, that we should cry out 
against the French for " carrying France about with them 
everywhere ?" 

The objects of the founders are set forth in the charter as 
" the advancement of religion and morality, and the promo- 
tion of useful knowledge ;" but as there is no theological fac- 
ulty, no religious test or exercise Avhatever, the philosophy 
of the first portion of the phrase is not easily imderstood. 

In no Western institutions is the radicalism oi Western 
thought so thoroughly manifested as in the universities ; in 
no English colonial institutions is conservatism so manifest. 
The contrast between Michigan and Sydney is far more strik- 
ing than that between Harvard and old Cambridge. 

Of the religious position of Australia there is little to be 
said : the Wesleyans, Catholics, and Presbyterians are strong- 
er, and the other denominations weaker, than they are at 
home. The general mingling of incongruous objects and of 



378 Greatee Britain. 

conflicting races, characteristic of colonial life, extends to re- 
ligious buildings. The graceful Wesleyan church, the Chi- 
nese joss-house, and the Catholic cathedral stand not far 
apart in Melbourne. In Australia the mixture of blood is not 
yet great. In South Australia, where it is most complete, 
the Catholics and Wesleyans have great strength. Angli- 
canism is naturally strongest where the race is most exclu- 
sively British — in Tasmania and New South "Wales. 

As far as the coast-tracts are concerned, Australia, as will 
be seen from what has been said of the individual colonies, is 
rapidly ceasing to be a land of great tenancies, and becoming 
a land of small freeholds, each cultivated by its owner. It 
need hardly be pointed out that, in the interests of the coun- 
try and of the race, this is a happy change. When English 
rural laborers commence to fully realize the misery of their 
position they will find not only America, but Australia also, 
open to them as a refuge and future home. Looming in the 
distance, we still, however, see the American problem of 
whether the Englishman can live out of England. Can he 
thrive except where mist and damp preserve the juices of his 
frame ? He comes from the fogs of the Baltic shores and 
from the Flemish lowlands ; gains in vigor in the south island 
of Kew Zealand. In Australia and America — hot and dry — 
the type has already changed. Will it eventually disappear ? 

It is still an open question whether the change of type 
among the English in America and Australia is a climatic 
adaptation on the part of nature, or a temporary divergence 
produced by abnormal causes, and capable of being modi- 
fied by care. 

Before we had done our talk the ship was pooped by a 
green sea, which, curling in over her taffrail, swept her decks 
from end to end, and our helmsmen, although regular old 
" hard-a-weather " fellows, had difficulty in keeping her upon 
her course. It was the last of the gale, and when we made 
up our beds upon the skylights the heavens were clear of 
scud, though the moon was still craped with a ceaseless roll 
of cloud. 



Colonies. 879 



CHAPTER XV. 

COLONIES. 

When" a Briton takes a survey of the colonies he finds 
much matter for surprise in the one-sided nature of the part- 
nership which exists between the mother and the daughter 
lands. No reason presents itself to him why our artisans 
and merchants should be taxed in aid of populations far 
more wealthy than our own, who have not, as we have, mil- 
lions of paupers to support. We at present tax our humblest 
classes, we weaken our defenses, we scatter our troops and 
fleets, and lay ourselves open to panics such as those of 1853 
and 1859, in order to protect against imaginary dangers the 
Australian gold-digger and Canadian farmer. There is some- 
thing ludicrous in the idea of taxing St. Giles's for the sup- 
port of Melbourne, and making Dorsetshire agricultural la- 
borers pay the cost of defending "New Zealand colonists in 
Maori wars. 

It is possible that the belief obtains in Britain among the 
least educated classes of the community that colonial ex- 
penses are rapidly decreasing, if they have not already wholly 
disappeared; but in fact they have for some years past been 
steadily and continuously growing in amount. 

As long as we choose to keep up such propugnacula as 
Gibraltar, Malta, and Bermuda, we must pay roundly for 
them, as we also must for such costly luxuries as our gold- 
coast settlements for the suppression of the slave-trade ; but 
if we confine the term " colonies " to English-speaking, white- 
inhabited, and self-governed lands, and exclude on the one 
hand garrisons such as Gibraltar, and on the other mere de- 
pendencies like the West Indies and Ceylon, we find that 
our true colonies in itsTorth America, Australia, Polynesia, 
and South Africa involve us nominally in yearly charges of 
almost two millions sterling, and, really, in untold expendi- 
ture. 

Canada is in all ways the most flagrant case. She draws 
from us some three millions annually for her defense; she 



380 Greater Britain. 

makes no contribution toward the cost ; she relies mainly on 
us to defend a frontier of 4000 miles, and she excludes our 
goods by prohibitive duties at her ports. In short, colonial 
expenses which, rightly or wrongly, our fathers bore (and 
that not ungrudgingly) when they enjoyed a monopoly of 
colonial trade, are borne by us in face of colonial prohibition. 
What the true cost to us of Canada may be is unfortunately 
an open question, and the loss by the weakening of our home 
forces we have no means of computing ; but when we con- 
sider that, on a fair statement of the case, Canada would be 
debited with the cost of a large j^ortion of the half-pay and 
recruiting services, of Horse Guards and War-office expenses, 
of arms, accoutrements, barracks, hospitals, and stores, and 
also with the gigantic expenses of two of our naval squad- 
rons, we can not but admit that we must pay at least three 
millions a year for the hatred that the Canadians profess to 
bear toward the United States. Whatever may be the case, 
however, with regard to Canada, less fault is to be found 
with the cost of the Australian colonies. If they bore a por- 
tion of the half-pay and recruiting' expenses, as well as the 
cost of the troops actually employed among them in time of 
peace, and also paid their share in the maintenance of the 
British navy — a share to increase with the increase of their 
merchant shipping — there would be little to desire, unless, 
indeed, we should wish that, in exchange for a check upon im- 
perial braggadocio and imperial waste, the Australias should 
also contribute toward the expenses of imperial wars. 

No reason can be shown for our spending millions on the 
defense of Canada against the Americans, or in aiding the 
New Zealand colonists against the Maories, that will not 
apply to their aiding us in case of a European war with 
France, control being given to their representatives over our 
public action in questions of imperial concern. Without any 
such control over imperial action, the old American colonists 
were well content to do their share of fighting in imperial 
wars. In 1689, in 1702, and in 1744 Massachusetts attacked 
the French, and taking from them Nova Scotia and others 
of their new plantations, handed them over to Great Britain. 
Even when the tax time came, Massachusetts, while declar- 
ing that the English Parliament had no right to tax colonies, 



Colonies. 881 

went on to say that the king could inform them of the ex- 
igencies of the public service, and that they were ready " to 
provide for them if required." 

It is not likely, however, nowadays, that our colonists 
would, for any long stretch of time, engage to aid us in our 
purely European wars. Australia would scarcely feel herself 
deeply interested in the guarantee of Luxembourg, nor Can- 
ada in the affairs of Servia. The fact that we in Britain paid 
our share — or rather nearly the whole cost — of the Maori 
wars would be no argument to an Australian, but only an 
additional proof to him of our extraordinary folly. We have 
been educated into a habit of paying with complacency oth- 
er people's bills — not so the Australian settler. 

As far as Australia is concerned, our soldiers are not used 
as troops at all. The colonists like the show of the red-coats, 
and the military duties are made up partly of guard-of-honor 
work and partly of the labors of police. The colonists well 
know that in time of war we should immediately withdraw 
our troops, and they trust wholly in their volunteers and the 
colonial marine. 

As long as we choose to allow the system to continue, the 
colonists are well content to reap the benefit. When we at 
last decide that it shall cease they will reluctantly consent. 
It is more than doubtful whether, if we were to insist to the 
utmost upon our rights as toward our southern colonies, they 
would do more than grumble and consent to our demands ; 
and there is no chance whatever of our asking for more than 
our simple due. 

When you talk to an intelligent Australian you can al- 
ways see that he fears that separation would be made the 
excuse for the equipment of a great and costly Australian 
fleet — not more necessary then than now — and that, however 
he may talk, he would, rather than separate from England, 
at least do his duty by her. 

The fear of conquest of the Australian colonies if we left 
them to themselves is on the face of it ridiculous. It is sufii- 
cient, perhaps, to say that the old American colonies, when 
they had but a million and a half of people, defended them- 
selves successfully against the then all-powerful French, and 
that there is no instance of a self-protected English colony 



382 Greater Britain. 

being conquered by the foreigner. The American colonies 
vahied so highly their independence of the Old Country in the 
matter of defense that they petitioned the Crown to be al- 
lowed to fight for themselves, and called the British army by 
the plain name of" grievance." 

As for our so-called defense of the colonies, in war-time we 
defend ourselves ; we defend the colonies only during peace. 
In war-time they are ever left to shift for themselves, and 
they would undoubtedly be better fit to do so were they in 
the habit of maintaining their military establishments in time 
of peace. The present system weakens us and them — us, by 
taxes and by the withdrawal of our men and ships ; the col- 
onies, by preventing the development of that self-reliance 
which is requisite to form a nation's greatness. The success- 
ful encountering of difiiculties is the marking feature of the 
national character of the English, and we can hardly expect 
a nation which has never encountered any, or which has been 
content to see them met by others, ever to become great. 
In short, as matters now stand, the colonies are a source of 
military weakness to us, and our " protection " of them is a 
source of danger to the colonists. IsTo doubt there are still 
among us men who would have wished to have seen America 
continue in union with England, on the principle on which 
the Russian conscripts are chained each to an old man — to 
keep her from going too fast — and who now consider it our 
duty to defend our colonies at whatever cost, on account of 
the " prestige " which attaches to the somewhat precarious 
tenure of these great lands. With such men it is impossible 
for colonial reformers to argue : the stand-points are wholly 
difierent. To those, however, who admit the injustice of the 
present system to the taxpayers of the mother-country, but 
who fear that her merchants would sufier by its disturbance, 
inasmuch as, in their belief, action on our part would lead to a 
disruption of the tie, we may plead that, even should separa- 
tion be the result, we should be none the worse off for its oc- 
currence. The retention of colonies at almost any cost has 
been defended — so far as it has been supported by argument 
at all — on the ground that the connection conduces to trade, 
to Avhich argument it is sufiicient to answer that no one has 
ever succeeded in showing what efiect upon trade the con- 



Colonies. 883 

nection can have, and that as excellent examples to the con- 
trary we have the fact that our trade with the Ionian Islands 
has greatly increased since their annexation to the kingdom 
of Greece, and a much more striking fact than even this — 
namely, that while the trade with England of the Canadian 
Confederation is only four-elevenths of its total external trade, 
or little more than one-third, the English trade of the United 
States was in 1860 (before the war) nearly two-thirds of its 
total external trade, in 1861 more than two-thirds, and in 1866 
(first year after the war) again four-sevenths of its total 
trade. Common institutions, common freedom, and common 
tongue have evidently far more to do with trade than union 
has ; and for purposes of commerce and civilization America 
is a truer colony of Britain than is Canada. 

It would not be difficult, were it necessary, to multiply ex- 
amples whereby to j)rove that trade with a country does not 
appear to be affected by union with or separation from it. 
Egypt (even when we carefully exclude from the returns In- 
dian produce in transport) sends us nearly all such produce 
as she exports, notwithstanding that the French largely con- 
trol the Government, and that we have much less footing in 
the country than the Italians, and no more than the Austrians 
or Spanish. Our trade with Australia means that the Aus- 
tralians want something of us and that we need something 
of them, and that we exchange with them our produce as we 
do in a larger degree with the Americans, the Germans, and 
the French. 

The trade argument being met, and it being remembered 
that our colonizes are no more an outlet for our surplus popu- 
lation than they would be if the Great Mogul ruled over 
them, as is seen by the fact that of every twenty people who 
leave the United Kingdom one goes to Canada, two to Aus- 
tralia, and sixteen to the United States, we come to the " ar- 
gument" which consists in the word "prestige." When ex- 
amined, this cry seems to mean that, in the opinion of the ut- 
terer, extent of empire is power — a doctrine under which 
Brazil ought to be nineteen and a half times, and China twen- 
ty-six times as powerful as France. Perhaps the best answer 
to the doctrine is a simple contradiction : those who have read 
history with most care well know that at all times extent 



384 Greatee Britain". 

of empire has been weakness. . England's real empire was 
small enough in 1650, yet it is rather doubtful whether her 
" prestige " ever reached the height it did while the Crom- 
wellian admirals swept the seas. The idea conveyed by the 
words " mother of free nations " is every bit as good as that 
contained in the cry " prestige," and the argument that, as 
the colonists are British subjects, we have no right to cast 
them adrift so long as they wish to continue citizens, is evi- 
dently no answer to those who merely urge that the colonists 
should pay their own policemen. 

It may, perhaps, be contended that the possession of " col- 
onies " tends to preserve us from the curse of small island 
countries, the dwarfing of mind which would otherwise make 
us Guernsey a little magnified. If this be true, it is a pow- 
erful argument in favor of continuance in the present system. 
It is a question, however, whether our real preservation from 
the insularity we deprecate is not to be found in the posses- 
sion of true colonies — of plantations such as America, in 
short — rather than in that of mere dependencies. That 
which raises us above the provincialism of citizenship of little 
England is our citizenship of the greater Saxondom which 
includes all that is best and wisest in the world. 

From the foundation separation would be harmless, does 
not of necessity follow the conclusion separation is to be de- 
sired. This much only is clear — that we need not hesitate to 
demand that Australia should do her duty. 

With the more enlightened thinkers of England separa- 
tion from the colonies has for many years been a favorite 
idea, but as regards the Australias it would h'ardly be advis- 
able. If we allow that it is to the interest both of our race 
and of the world that the Australias should prosper, we have 
to ask whether they would do so in a higher degree if sepa- 
rated from the mother-country than if they remained connect- 
ed with her and with each other by a federation. It has 
often been said that, instead of the varying relations which 
now exist between Britain and America, we should have seen 
a perfect friendship had we but permitted the American col- 
onies to go their way in peace ; but the example does not 
hold in the case of Australia, which is by no means wishful 
to go at all. 



Colonies. 885 

Under separation we should, perhaps, find the colonies 
better emigration-fields for our surplus population than they 
are at present. Many of our emigrants who flock to the 
United States are attracted by the idea that they are going 
to become citizens of a new nation instead of dependents 
upon an old one. On the separation of Australia from En- 
gland we might expect that a portion of these sentimental- 
ists would be diverted from a colony necessarily jealous of us 
so long as we hold Canada, to one which from accordance of 
interests is likely to continue friendly or allied. This argu- 
ment, however, would have no weight with those who desire 
the independence of Canada, and who look upon America as 
still our colonyr 

Separation, we may then conclude, though infinitily bet- 
ter than a continuance of the existing one-sided tie, would in 
a healthier state of our relations, not be to the interest of 
Britain, although it would perhaps be morally beneficial to 
Australia. Any relation, however, would be preferable to the 
existing one of mutual indifference and distrust. Recogniz- 
ing the fact that Australia has come of age, and calling on 
her, too, to recognize it, we should say to the Australian col- 
onists, " Our present system can not continue ; will you 
amend it, or separate ?" The worst thing that can happen 
to us is that we should " drift " blindly into separation. 

After all, the strongest of the arguments in favor of sep- 
aration is the somewhat paradoxical one that would bring 
us a step nearer to the virtual confederation of the English 
race, 

E 



PAET IV.~INDIA* 



CHAPTER I. 

MAEITIME CETLO]!^, 



We failed to sight the Island of Cocoas, a territory where 
John Rpss is king — a worthy Scotchman who, having settled 
down in mid-ocean some hundreds of miles from any port, 
proceeded to annex himself to Java and the Dutch. On be- 
ing remonstrated with, he was made to see his error ; and, 
being appointed governor of and consul to himself and labor- 
ers, now hoists the union-jack, while his island has a red line 
drawn under its name upon the map. Two days after quit- 
ting John Ross's latitude we crossed the line in the heavy 
noonday of the equatorial belt of calms. The sun itself pass- 
ed the equator the same day ; so, after having left Australia 
at the end of autumn, I suddenly found myself in Asia in the 
early spring. Mist obscured the skies except at dawn and 
sunset, when there was a clear air, in which floated cirro- 
cumuli with flat bases — clouds cut in half, as it seemed — 
and we were all convinced that Homer must have seen the 

* A regular and uniform system of spelling of native names and other 
words has lately been brought into common use in India, and adopted by 
the Government. Not without hesitation I have decided upon ignoring this 
improvement, and confining myself to spelling known to and used by the 
English in England, for whom especially I am writing. 

I am aware that there is no system in the spelling, and that it is scien- 
tifically absurd ; nevertheless the new Government spelling is not yet sufii- 
ciently well understood in England to warrant its use in a book intended for 
general circulation. The scientific spelling is not always an improvement 
to the eye, moreover : Talookdars of Oude may not be right, but it is a neat- 
er phrase than " Taalulehdars of Awdh ;" and it will probably be long be- 
fore we in England write "kuli" for coolie, or adopt the spelling "Tata 
hordes." 



Maritime Ceylon. 887 

Indian Ocean, so completely did the sea in the equatorial belt 
realize his epithet " purple " or " wine-dark." All day long 
the flying fish -— " those good and excellent creatures of 
God," as Drake styled them — were skimming over the wa- 
ter on every side. The Elizabethan captain, who knew 
their delicacy of taste, attributed their freedom from the 
usual slime of fish and their wholesome nature to " their 
continued exercise in both air and water." The heat was 
great, and I made the discovery that Australians as well as 
Americans can put their feet above their heads. It may be 
asserted that the height above the deck of the feet of pas- 
sengers on board ocean steamers varies directly as the heat, 
and inversely as the number of hours before dinner. 

In the afternoon of the day we crossed the line we sight- 
ed a large East Indiaman lying right in our course, and so 
little way was she making that, on coming up with her, we 
had to port our helm in order not to run her down. She 
hailed us, and we lay to while she* sent a boat aboard us with 
her mail ; for although she was already a month out from 
Calcutta and bound for London, our letters would reach home 
before she was around the Cape — a singular commentary 
upon the use of sailing-ships in the Indian seas. Before the 
boat had left our side the ships had floated so close together 
through attraction, that we had to make several revolutions 
with the screw in order to prevent collision. 

When we, who were all sleeping upon deck, were aroused 
by the customary growl from the European quartermaster 
of " Four o'clock, sir ! Going to swab decks, sir ! Get up 
sir !" given with the flare of the lantern in our eyes, we were 
still over a hundred miles from Galle ; but before the sun 
had risen we caught sight of Adam's Peak, a purple mass 
upon the northern sky, and soon we were racing with a French 
steamer from Saigon, and with a number of white-sailed na- 
tive craft from the Maldives. Within a few hours we were 
at anchor in a small bay surrounded with lofty cocoa-palms, 
in which were lying, tossed by a rolling swell, some dozen 
huge steamers, yard-arm to yard-arm — the harbor of Point 
du Galle. Every ship was flying her ensign, and in the 
damp, hot air the old tattered union-jacks seemed brilliant 
crimson, and the dull green of the cocoa-palms became a daz- 



388 Greater Britain. 

zling emerald. The scene wanted but the bright phimage 
of the Panama macaws. 

Once seated in the piazza of the Oriental Company's ho- 
tel, the best managed in the East, I had before me a curious 
scene. Along the streets were pouring silent crowds of tall 
and graceful girls, as we at the first glance supposed, wear- 
ing white petticoats and bodices, their hair carried off the 
face with a decorated hoop and caught at the back by a high 
tortoise-shell comb. As they drew near mustaches began to 
show, and I saw that they were men, while walking with 
them were women naked to the waist, combless, and far more 
rough and " manly " than their husbands. Petticoat and 
chignon are male institutions in Ceylon, and time after time 
I had to look twice before I could fix the passer's sex. My 
rule at last became to set down every body that was wom- 
anly as a man, and every body that was manly as a woman. 
Cinghalese, Kandians, Tam^s from South India, and Moormen 
with crimson caftans and shaven crowns, formed the body of 
the great crowd ; but besides these there were Portuguese, 
Chinese, Jews, Arabs, Parsees, Englishmen, Malays, Dutch- 
men, and half-caste burghers, and now and then a veiled Ai*a- 
bian woman or a Veddah — one of the aboriginal inhabitants 
of the isle. Ceylon has never been independent, and in a 
singular mixture of races her ports bear testimony to the num- 
ber of the foreign conquests. 

Tavo American missionaries were among the passers-by, 
but one of them, detecting strangers, came up to the piazza 
in search of news. There had been no loss of national char- 
acteristics in these men ; they were brimful of the mixture 
of earnestness and quaint profanity which distinguishes the 
New England Puritan : one of them described himself to me 
as "just a kind of journeyman soul-saver like." 

The Australian strangers were not long left unmolested 
by more serious intruders than grave Vermonters. The cry 
of " baksheesh " — an Arabian word that goes from Gibraltar 
to China, and from Ceylon to the Khyber Pass, and which 
has reached us in the form of " boxes," in our phrase Christ- 
mas-boxes — was the first native word I heard in the East, 
at Galle, as it was afterward the last, at Alexandria. One of 
the beggars was an Albino, fair as a child in a Hampshire lane 



Maritime Ceylon. 889 

— one of those strange sports of nature from whom Cinghalese 
tradition asserts the Europeai^ races to be sprung. 

The beggars were soon driven off by the hotel servants, 
and better licensed plunderers began their work. "Ah 
safeer, ah rupal, ah imral, ah mooney stone, ah opal, ah amtit, 
ah !" was the cry from every quarter, and jewel-sellers of all 
the nations of the East descended on us in a swarm. " Me 
givee you written guarantee dis real stone ;" " Yes, dat real 
stone; but dis good stone — dat no good stone — no water. 
Ah, see !" " Dat no good stone. Ah, sahib, you tell good 
stone ; all dese bad stone, reg'lar England stone. You go by 
next ship? E'o? Ah, den you come see me shop. Dese 
ship-passenger stone — humbuk stone. Ship gone, den you 
come me shop ; see good stone. When you come ? eh ? when 
you come ?" " Ah safeer, ah catty-eye, ah pinkee collal !" 
Meanwhile every Galle-dwelling European, at the bar of the 
hotel, was adding to the din by shouting to the native serv- 
ants, " Boy, turn out these fellows, and stop their noise." 
This cry of " boy " is a relic of the old Dutch times : it was 
the Hollander's term for his slave, and hence for every mem- 
ber of the inferior race. THI first servant that I heard called 
"boy" was a tottering, white-haired old man. 

The gems of Ceylon have long been famed. One thou- 
sand three hundred and seventy years ago the Chinese rec- 
ords tell us that Ceylon, then tributary to the empire, sent 
presents to the Brother of the Moon, one of the gifts being a 
" lapis-lazuli spittoon." It is probable that some portion of 
the million and a half pounds sterling which are annually 
absorbed in this small island, but four-fifths the size of Ire- 
land, is consumed in the setting of the precious stones for 
native use ; every one you meet wears four or five heavy 
silver rings, and sovereigns are melted down to make gold 
ornaments. 

Rushing away from the screaming crowd of peddlers, I 
went with some of my Australian friends to stroll upon the 
ramparts and enjoy the evening salt breeze. We met sever- 
al bodies of white-faced European, sauntering like ourselves, 
and dressed like us in white trowsers and loose white jackets 
and pith hats. What we looked like I do not know, but 
they resembled ships' stewards. At last it struck me that 



890 Greater Britain. 

they were soldiers, and upon inquiring I found that these 
washed-out dawdlers represented a British regiment of the 
line. I was by this time used to see linesmen out of scarlet, 
having beheld a parade in bush-ranger beards and blue-serge 
"jumpers" at Taranaki, in New Zealand ; but one puts up 
easier with the soldier-bush-ranger than with the soldier- 
steward. 

The climate of the day had been exquisite with its bright 
air and cooling breeze, and I had begun to think that those 
who knew Acapulco and Echuca could afford to laugh at the 
East with its thermometer at 88°. The reckoning came at 
night, however, for by dark all the breeze was gone, and the 
thermometer, instead of falling, had risen to 90° when I lay 
down to moan and wait for dawn. As I was dropping off 
to sleep at about four o'clock a native came round and 
closed the doors to shut out the dangerous land-breeze that 
springs up at that hour. Again, at half-past five, it was 
cooler, and I had began to doze, when a cannon-shot, fired 
apparently under my bed, brought me upon my feet with 
something more than a start. I remembered the saying of 
the. Western boy before PeterslUtirg when he heard for the 
first time the five o'clock camp-gun, and called to his next 
neighbor at the fire, " Say, Bill, did you hap to hear how 
partic'lar loud the day broke just now?" for it was the 
morning-gun, which in Ceylon is always .fired at the same 
time, there being less than an hour's difference between the 
longest and shortest days. Although it was still pitch dark, 
the bugles began to sound the reveille on every side — in the 
infantry lines, the ^artillery barracks, and the lines of the 
Malay regiment, the well-known Ceylon Rifles. Ten min- 
utes afterward, when I had bathed by lamplight, I was eat- 
ing plantains and taking my morning tea in a cool room lit 
by the beams of the morning sun, so short is the April twi- 
light in Ceylon. 

It is useless to consult the thermometer about heat: a 
European can labor in the open air in South Australia with 
the thermometer at 110° in the shade, while with a thermom- 
eter at 88° the nights are unbearable in Ceylon. To dis- 
cover whether the climate of a place be really hot examine 
its newspapers ; and if you find the heat recorded you may 



Maritime Ceylon. S91 

make up your mind that it is a variable climate, but if no 
" remarkable heat " or similar announcements appear then 
you may be sure that you are in a permanently hot place. 
It stands to reason that no one in the tropics ever talks of 
" tropical heat." 

In so equable a climate the apathy of the Cinghalese is 
not surprising; but they are not merely lazy, they are a 
cowardly, effeminate, and revengeful race. They sleep and 
smoke, and smoke and sleep, rousing themselves only once 
in the day to snatch a bowl of curry and rice or to fleece a 
white man ; and so slowly do the people run the race of life 
that even elephantiasis, common here, does not seem to put 
the sufferer far behind his fellow-men. Buddhism is no mys- 
tery when expounded under this climate. See a few Cin- 
ghalese stretched in the shade of a cocoa-palm, and you can 
conceive Buddha sitting cross-legged for ten thousand years 
contemplating his own perfection. 

The second morning that I spent in Galle the captain of 
the Bombay was kind enough to send his gig for me to the 
landing-steps at dawn, and his Malay crew soon rowed me 
to the ship, where_ the captain joined me, and we pulled 
across the harbor to Watering-place Point, and bathed in 
the shallow sea, out of the reach of sharks. When we had 
dressed we went on to a jetty to look into the deep water 
just struck by the rising sun. I should have marvelled at 
the translucency of the waters had not the awful clearness 
with which the bottom of the Canadian lakes stand revealed 
in evening light been fresh within my memory, but here the 
bottom was fairly paved with corallines of inconceivable 
brilliancy of color, and tenanted by still more gorgeous fish. 
Of the two that bore the palm one was a little fish of maza- 
rine blue, without a speck of any other color, and perfect 
too in shape ; the second, a silver fish, with a band of soft 
brown velvet round its neck and another about its tail. In 
a still more sheltered cove the fish ^ere so thick that dozens 
of Moors were throwing into the water, with the arm-twist 
of a fly-fisher, bare hooks, which they jerked through the 
shoal and into the air, never failing to bring them up clothed 
with a fish, caught most times by the fin. 

In the evening two of us tried a native dinner at a house 



392 Geeater Britain. 

where Cinghalese gentlemen dine when they come into Galle 
on business. Our fare was as follows : First course : a curry 
of the delicious seir-fish, a sort of mackerel ; a prawn curry ; 
a bread-fruit and cocoa-nut curry ; a Brinjal curry, and a dish 
made of jack-fruit, garlic, and mace ; all washed down by iced 
water. Second course: plantains, and very old arrack in 
thimble-glasses, followed by black coffee. Of meat there was 
no sign, as the Cinghalese rarely touch it ; and, although we 
liked our vegetarian dinner, my friend passed a criticism in 
action on it by dining again at the hotel-ordinary one hour 
later. We agreed, too, that the sickly smell of cocoa-nut 
would cleave to us for weeks. 

Starting with an Australian friend at the dawn of my 
third day in the island I took the coach by the coast-road to 
Columbo. We drove along a magnificent road in an avenue 
of giant cocoa-nut-palms, with the sea generally within easy 
sight, and with a native hut at each few yards. Every two 
or three miles the road crossed a lagoon alive with bathers, 
and near the .bridge was generally a. village, bazar, and 
Buddhist temple, built pagoda-shape and filled with worship- 
ers. The road was thronged with gayly-dressed Cinghalese ; 
and now and again we would pass a Buddhist priest in saf- 
fron-colored robes hastening along, his umbrella borne over 
him b J a boy clothed from top to toe in white. The umbrel- 
las ol the priests are of yellow silk, and shaped like ours, but 
other natives carry flat-topped umbrellas, gilt, or colored red 
and black. The Cinghalese farmers we met travelling to 
their temples in carts drawn by tiny bullocks. Such was the 
brightness of the air that the people, down to the very beg- 
gars, seemed clad in holiday attire. 

As we journeyed on we began to find more variety in the 
scenery and vegetation, and were charmed with the scarlet- 
blossomed cotton-tree, and with the areca, or betel-nut-palm. 
The cocoa-nut groves, too, were carpeted with an under- 
growth of orchids and ipecacuanha, and here and there was 
a bread-fruit-tree or a hibiscus. 

In Ceylon we have retained the Dutch posting system, 
and small light coaches, drawn by four or six small horses at 
a gallop, run over excellent roads, carrying, besides the pas- 
sengers, two boys behind, who shout furiously whenever ve- 



Maritime Ceylon. 893 

hides or passengers obstruct the mails, and who at night 
carry torches high in the air to light the road. Thus we 
dashed through the bazars and cocoa-groves, then across the 
golden sands covered with rare shells, and fringed on the one 
side with the bright blue dancing sea, dotted with many a 
white sail, and on the other side with deep green jungle, in 
which were sheltered dark lagoons. Once in a while we 
would drive out on to a plain, varied by clumps of fig and 
tulip trees, and looking to the east would sight the purple 
mountains ot the central range ; then, dashing again into the 
thronged bazars, would see little but the bright palm-trees 
relieved upon an azure sky. The road is one continuous vil- 
lage, for the population is twelve times as dense in the west- 
ern as in the eastern provinces of Ceylon. No wonder that 
ten thousand natives have died of cholera within the last few 
months ! All this dense coast population is supported by the 
cocoa-nut, for there are in Ceylon 200,000 acres under cocoa- 
palms, which yield from seven to eight hundred million co- 
coa-nuts a year, and are worth two millions sterling. 

iN'ear Bentotte, where we had lunched off horrible oysters 
of the pearl-yielding kind, we crossed the Kaluganga River, 
densely fringed with jgaangrove, and in its waters saw a py- 
thon swiming bravely toward the shore. Snakes are not so 
formidable as land-leeches, the Cinghalese and planters say, 
and no one hears of many persons being bitten, though a 
great reward for an antidote to the cobra bite has lately been 
offered by the Rajah of Travancore. 

As we entered what the early maps style "The Christian 
Kyngdom of Columbo," though where they found their 
Christians no one knows, our road lay through the cinnamon 
gardens, which are going out of cultivation, as they no longer 
pay, although the cinnamon laurel is a spice-grove in itself, 
giving cinnamon from its bark, camphor from the roots, clove- 
oil from its leaves. The plant grows wild about the island, 
and is cut and peeled by the natives at no cost save that of 
children's labor, which they do not count as cost at all. The 
scene in the gardens that still remain was charming : the cin- 
namon-laurel bushes contrasted well with the red soil, and 
the air was alive with dragon-flies, moths, and winged beetles, 
while the softness of the evening breeze had tempted out the 

R 2 



894 Greater Britain. 

half-caste Dutch " burgher " families of the city, who were 
driving and walking clothed in white, the ladies with their 
jet hair dressed with natural flowers. The setting sun threw 
brightness without heat into the gay scene. 

A friend who had horses ready for us at the hotel where 
the mail-coach stopped said that it was not too late for a 
ride through the fort or European town inside the walls ; so 
cantering along the esplanade, where the officers of the gar- 
rison were enjoying their evening ride, we crossed the moat, 
and found ourselves in what is perhaps the most graceful 
street in the world : a double range of long low houses of 
bright white stone, with deep piazzas, buried in masses of 
bright foliage, in which the fire-flies were beginning to play. 
In the centre of the fort is an Italian campanile, which serves 
at once as a belfry, a clock-tower, and a light-house. In the 
morning before sunrise we climbed this tower for the view. 
The central range stood up sharply on the eastern sky as the 
sun was still hid behind it, and to the south-east there tow- 
ered high the peak where Adam mourned his son a hundred 
years. In color, shape, and height the Cinghalese Alps re- 
semble the Central Apennines, and the view from Columbo 
is singularly like that from Pesaro on^e Adriatic. As we 
looked landward from the campanile the native town was 
mirrored in the lake, and outside the city the white-coated 
troops were marching by companies on to the parade-ground, 
whence we could faintly hear the distant bands. 

Driving back in a carriage shaped like a street cab, but 
with fixed Venetians instead of sides and windows, we visit- 
ed the curing establishment of the Ceylon Coffee Company, 
where the coffee from the hills is dried and sorted. Thou- 
sands of native girls are employed in coffee-picking at the 
various stores, but it is doubted whether the whole of this la- 
bor is not wasted, the berries being sorted according to their 
shape and size — characteristics which seem in no way to af- 
fect the flavor. The Ceylon exporters say that if we choose 
to pay twice as much for shapely as for ill-shaped berries, it 
is no business of theirs to refuse to humor us by sorting. 

The most remarkable institution in Columbo is the steam 
factory where the Government make or mend such machin- 
ery as their experts certify can not be dealt with at any pri- 



Maritime Ceylok. 895 

vate works existing in the island. The Government ele- 
phants are kept at the same place, but I found them at work 
up country on the Kandy road. 

In passing through the native town upon Slave Island we 
saw some French Catholic priests in their working jungle 
dresses of blue serge. They have met with singular success- 
es in Ceylon, havmg made 150,000 converts, while the En- 
glish and American missions have between them only 30,000 
natives. The Protestant missionaries in Ceylon complain 
much of the planters, whom they accuse of declaring when 
they wish to hire men that " no Christian need apply ;" but 
it is a remarkable fact that neither Protestants nor Catholics 
can make converts among the self-supported " Moormen," the 
active, pushing inhabitants of the ports, who are Mohammed- 
ans to a man. The chief cause of the success of the Catho- 
lics among the Cinghalese seems to be the remarkable earn- 
estness ol the French and Italian missionary priests. Our 
English missionaries in the East are too often men incapable 
of bearing fatigue or climate ; ignorant of every trade, and 
inferior even in teaching and preaching powers to their ri- 
vals. It is no -easy matter to spread Christianity among 
the Cinghalese, the inventors of Buddhism, the most ancient 
and most widely-spread of all the religions of the world. Ev- 
ery Buddhist firmly believes in the potential perfection of 
man, and is incapable of understanding the ideas of original 
sin and redemption ; and a Cinghalese Buddhist — passionless 
himself — can not comprehend the passionate worship that 
Christianity requires. The Catholics, however, do not neg- 
lect the Eastern field for missionary labor. Four of their 
bishops from Cochin China and Japan were met by me in 
Galle upon their way to Rome. 

Our drive was brought to an end by a visit to the old 
Dutch quarter — a carefiil imitation of Amsterdam; indeed, 
one of its roads still bears the portentous Batavian name of 
Dam Street. Their straight canals and formal lines of trees 
the Hollanders have carried with them throughout the world ; 
but in Columbo, not content with manufacturing imitation 
canals, that began and ended in a wall, they dug great arti- 
ficial lakes to recall their well-loved Hague. 

The same evening I set off by the new railway for Kandy 



396 Greater Britain. 

and ISTuwara Ellia (pronounced ]Srooralia),in the hills. Hav- 
ino- no experience of the climate of mountain regions in the 
tropics, I expected a merely pleasant change, and left Colum- 
bo wearing my white kit, which served me well enough as 
far as Ambe Pusse — the railway terminus, which we reached 
at ten o'clock at night. We started at once by coach, and 
had not driven far up the hills in the stili moonlight before 
the cold became extreme, and I was saved from a severe chill 
only by the kindness of the cofiee-planter who shared the 
back seat with me, and who, being well clad in woolen, lent 
me his great-coat. After this incident we chatted pleasantly 
without fear of interruption from our sole companion — a na- 
tive girl, who sat silently chewing betel all the way — and 
reached Kandy before dawn. Telling the hotel servants to 
wake me in an hour, I wrapped myself in a blanket — the first 
I had seen since I left Australia — and enjoyed a refreshing 
sleep. 



CHAPTER n. 

KANDY. 

The early morning was foggy and cold as an October 
dawn in an English forest ; but before I had been long in the 
gardens of the Government-house the sun rose, and the heat 
returned once more. After wandering among the petunias 
and fan-palms of the gardens I passed on into the city, the 
former capital of the Kandian or highland kingdom, and one 
of the holiest of Buddhist towns. The kingdom was nev- 
er conquered by the Portuguese or Dutch while they held 
the coasts, and was not overrun by us till 1815, while it has 
several times been in rebellion since that date. The people 
still retain their native customs in a high degree : for instance, 
the Kandian husband does not take his wife's inheritance un- 
less he lives with her on her father's land : if she lives with 
him, she forfeits her inheritance. Kandian law, indeed, is ex- 
pressly maintained by us except in the matters of polygamy 
and polyandry, although the maritime Cinghalese are gov- 
erned, as are the English in Ceylon and at the Cape, by the 
civil code of Holland. 



Kandy. 897 

The difference between the Kandian and coast Cinghalese 
is very great. At Kandy I found the men wearing flowing 
crimson robes and flat-topped caps, while their faces were 
lighter in color than those of the coast people, and many of 
them had beards. The women also wore the nose-ring in a 
different way, and were clothed above as well as below the 
waist. It is possible that some day we may unfortunately 
hear more of this energetic and warlike people. 

The city is one that dwells long in the mind. The Up- 
per Town is one great garden, so numerous are the sacred 
groves, vocal with the song of the Eastern orioles ; but here 
and there are dotted about pagoda-shaped temples, identical 
in form with those of Tartary two thousand miles away, and 
from these there proceeds a roar of tomtoms that almost 
drowns the song. One of these temples contains the holiest 
of Buddhist relics, the tooth of Buddha, which is yearly car- 
ried in a grand procession. When we first annexed the Kan- 
dian kingdom we recognized the Buddhist Church, made our 
officers take part in the procession of the Sacred Tooth, and 
sent a State offering to the shrine. Times are changed since 
then, but the Buddhist priests are still exempt from certain 
taxes. All round the sacred inclosures are ornamented walls 
with holy sculptured figures ; and in the Lower Town are 
fresh-water lakes and tanks, formed by damming the Mava- 
liganga River, and also, in some measure, holy. An atmos- 
phere of Buddhism pervades all Kandy. 

From Kandy I visited the coffee-district of which it is the 
capital and centre, but I was much disappointed with regard 
to the amount of land that is still open to coffee-cultivation. 
At the Government Botanic Garden at Peredenia (where the 
jalap plant, the castor-oil plant, and the ipecacuanha were 
growing side by side), I was told that the shrub does not 
flourish under 1500 nor over 3000 or 4000 feet above sea- 
level, and that all the best coffee-land is already planted. 
Coffee-growing has already done so much for Ceylon 4;hat it 
is to be hoped that it has not reached its limit : in thirty- 
three years it has doubled her trade ten l^es, and to En- 
gland alone she now sends two millions', worth of coffee every 
year. The central district of the island, in which lie the 
hills and coffee-country, is, with the exception of the towns, 



898 Greater Britain. 

politically not a portion of Ceylon : there are English capital, 
English management, and Indian labor, and the cocoa-palm 
is unknown; Tamil laborers are exclusively employed upon 
the plantations, although the carrying-trade, involving but 
little labor, is in the hands of the Cinghalese. No such of- 
ficial discouragement is shown to the European planters in 
Ceylon as that which they experience in India ; and were 
there but more good coffee-lands and more capital all would 
be well. The planters say that, after two years' heavy ex- 
penditure and dead loss, 20 per cent, can be made by men 
who take in sufficient capital, but that no one ever does take 
capital enough for the land he buys, and that they all have 
to borrow from one of the Columbo companies at 12 per cent., 
and are then bound to ship their coffee through that compa- 
ny alone. It is regarded as an open question by many disin- 
terested friends of Ceylon whether it might not be wise for 
the local Government to advance money to the planters ; but 
besides the fear of jobbery, there is the objection to this 
course that the Government, becoming interested in the suc- 
cess of coffee-planting, might also come to connive at the op- 
pression of the native laborers. This oppression of the peo- 
ple lies at the bottom of that Dutch system which is often 
held up for our imitation in Ceylon. 

Those who narrate to us the effects of the Java system 
forget that it is not denied that in the tropical islands, with 
an idle population and a rich soil, compulsory labor may be 
the only way of developing the resources of the countries, 
but they fail to show the justification for our developing the 
resources of the country by such means. The Dutch culture- 
system puts a planter down upon the Crown lands, and, hav- 
ing made advances to him, leaves it to him to find out how 
he shall repay the Government. Forced labor — under what- 
ever name — is the natural result. 

The Dutch, moreover, bribe the great native chiefs by 
princely salaries and vast percentage upon the crops their 
people raise, and force the native agriculturists to grow spices 
for the Royal Market of Amsterdam. Of the purchase of 
these spices the Government has a monopoly : it buys them 
at Avhat price it will, and, selling again in Europe to the 
world, clears annually some £4,000,000 sterling by the job. 



Kandy. 899 

That plunder, slavery, and famine often follow the extension 
of their system is nothing to the Dutch. Strict press laws 
prevent the Dutch at home from hearing any thing of the 
discontent in Java except, when famine or insurrection call 
attention to the isle ; and £4,000,000 a year profit, and half 
the expenses of their navy paid for them by one island in 
the Eastern seas, make up for many deaths of brown-faced 
people by starvation. 

The Dutch often deny that the Government retains the 
monopoly of export ; but the fact of the matter is that the 
Dutch Trading Company, who have the monopoly of the ex- 
ports of the produce of Crown lands — which amount to two- 
thirds of the total exports of the isle — are mere agents of 
the Government. 

It is hard to say that, apart from the nature of the cul- 
ture-system, the Dutch principle of making a profit out of 
the countries which they rule is inconsistent with the posi- 
tion of a Christian nation. It is the ancient system of coun- 
tries having possessions in the East, and npon our side we 
are not able to show any definite reasons in favor of our 
course of scrupulously keeping separate the Indian revenue, 
and spending Indian profits upon India and Cinghalese in 
Ceylon, except such reasons as would logically lead to our 
quitting India altogether. That the Dutch should make a 
profit out of Java is perhaps not more immoral than that 
they should be there. At the same time the character of the 
Dutch system lowers the tone of the whole Dutch nation, 
and especially of those who have any connection with the 
Indies, and effectually prevents future amendment. With 
our system there is some chance of right being done, so small 
is our self-interest in the wrong. From the fact that no sur- 
plus is sent home from Ceylon, she is at least free from that 
bane of Java — the desire of the local authorities to increase 
as much as possible the valuable productions of their dis- 
tricts, even at the risk of famine, provided only that they may 
hope to put off the famine until after their time — a desire 
that produces the result that subaltern Dutch officers who ob- 
serve in their integrity the admirable rules which have been 
made for the protection of the native population are heartily 
abused for their ridiculous scrupulosity, as it is styled. 



400 Greater Britain. 

Not to be carried away by the material success of the 
Dutch system, it is as well to bear in mind its secret history. 
A private company — the Dutch Trading Society — was found- 
ed at Amsterdam in 1824, the then king being the largest 
shareholder. The company was in difficulties in 1830, when 
the king, finding he was losing money fast, sent out as Gov- 
ernor-general of the Dutch East Indies his personal friend 
Van den Bosch. The next year the culture-system, with all 
its attendant horrors, was introduced into Java by Van den 
Bosch, the Dutch Trading Society being made agents for the 
Government. The result was the extraordinary prosperity 
of the company, and the leaving by the merchant-king of a 
private fortune of fabulous amount. 

The Dutch system has been defended by every conceiva- 
ble kind of blind misrepresentation ; it has even been declared, 
by writers who ought certainly to know better, that the four 
millions of surplus that Holland draws from Java, being 
profits on trade^ .are not taxation ! Even the blindest ad- 
mirers of the system are forced, however, to admit that it 
involves the absolute prohibition of missionary enterprise 
and total exclusion from knowledge of the Java people. 

The Ceylon planters have at present political as well as 
financial difficulties on their hands. They have petitioned 
the queen for " self-government for Ceylon," and for control 
of the revenue by " representatives of the public " — excellent 
principles, if " public " meant public, and " Ceylon," Ceylon ; 
but when we inquire of the planters what they really mean 
we find that by " Ceylon " they understand Galle and Co- 
lumbo Fort, and by " the public " they mean themselves. 
There are at present six unofficial members of the Council: 
of these the whites have three members, the Dutch burghers 
one, and the natives two ; and the planters expect the same 
proportions to be kept in a Council to which supreme power 
shall be intrusted in the disposition of the revenues. They 
are, indeed, careful to explain that they in no way desire the 
extension of representative institutions to Ceylon. 

The first thing that strikes the English traveller in Ceylon 
is the apparent slightness of our hold upon the country. In 
my journey from Galle to Columbo, by early morning and 
midday, I met no white man; from Columbo to Kandy I 



Kandy. 401 

travelled with one, but met none ; at Kandy I saw no whites ; 
at ]N"uwara EUia, not half a dozen. On my return, I saw no 
whites between E'uwara Ellia and Ambe Pusse, where there 
was a white man in the railway-station j and on my return 
by evening from Columbo to Galle, in all the thronging 
crowds along the roads there was not a single European. 
There are hundreds of Cinghalese in the interior who live 
and die and never see a white man. Out of the two and a 
quarter millions of people who dwell in what the planters 
call the " colony of Ceylon " there are but 3000 Europeans, 
of whom 1500 are our soldiers, and 250 our civilians. Of the 
European non-official class there are but 1300 persons, or 
about 600 grown-up men. The proposition of the Planter's 
Association is that we should confide the despotic govern- 
ment over two and a quarter millions of Buddhist, Moham- 
medan, and Hindoo laborers t% these ^00 English Christian 
employers. It is not the Ceylon planters who have a griev- 
ance against u^, but we who have a serious complaint against 
them ; so flourishing a dependency should certainly provide 
for all the costs of her defense. 

Some of the mountain views between Kandy and E'uwara 
Ellia are full of grandeur, though they lack the ]N'ew Zealand 
snows ; but none can match, for variety and color, that which 
I saw on my return from the ascent to the Kaduganava 
Pass, where you look over a foreground of giant-leaved tali- 
pot and slender areca palms and tall bamboos, lit with the 
scarlet blooms of the cotton-tree, on to a plain dotted with 
banyan-tree groves and broken by wooded hills. On either 
side the deep valley-bottoms are carpeted with bright green 
— the wet rice-lands or terraced paddy-fields from which the 
natives gather crop after crop throughout the year. 

In the union of rich foliage with deep color and grand 
forms no scenery save that of l^ew Zealand can bear com- 
parison with that of the hill country of Ceylon, unless, in- 
deed, it be the scenery of Java and the far Eastern isles. 



402 Greater Britain. 



CHAPTER m. 

MADRAS TO CALCUTTA. 

Spending but a single day in Madras — an inferior Colum- 
"bo — I passed on to Calcutta with a pleasant remembrance 
of tlie air of prosperity that hangs about the chief city of 
what is still called by Bengal civilians " The Benighted Pres- 
idency." Small as are the houses, poor as are the shops, every 
one looks well-to-do and every body happy, from the not un- 
deservedly famed cooks at the club to the catamaran men on 
the shore. Coffee and good government have of late done 
much for Madras. » 

The surf consists of two lines of rollers, and is altogether 
inferior to the fine-weather swell on the west coast of New 
Zealand, and only to be dignified and promoted into surfship 
by men of that fine imagination which will lead them to sniff 
the spices a day before they reach Ceylon, or the pork and 
molasses when off Nantucket light-ship. The row through 
the first roller in the lumbering MassuUah boat, manned by 
a dozen sinewy blacks, the waiting for a chance between the 
first and second lines of spray, and then the dash for shore, 
the crew singing their measured "Ah ! lah ! lalala ! — ah ! lah ! 
lalala !" the stroke coming with the accented syllable, and 
the helmsman shrieking with excitement, is a more preten- 
tious ceremony than that which accompanies the crossing of 
Hokitika bar, but the passage is a far less dangerous one. 
The MassuUah boats are like empty hay-barges on the 
Thames, but built without nails, so that they " give " instead 
of breaking up when battered by the sand on one side and 
the seas upon the other. This is a very wise precaution in 
the case of boats which are always made to take the shore 
broadside on. The first sea that strikes the boat either shoots 
the passenger on to the dry sand or puts him where he can 
easily de caught by the natives on the beach, but the Massul- 
lah boat herself gets a terrible banging before the crew can 
haul her out of reach of the seas. 



Madras to Calcutta. 403 

Sighting the Temple of Juggernaiith and one palm-tree, 
but seeing no land, we entered the Hoogly^i^teaming be- 
tween light-houses, guard-ships, and buoys, but not catching 
a glimpse of the low land of the Sunderabunds till we had 
been many hours in '' the river." After lying right off the 
tiger-infested Island of Saugur, we started on our run up to 
Calcutta before the sun was risen. Compared with Ceylon 
the scene was English ; there was nothing tropical about it 
except the mist upon the land ; and low villas, and distant 
factory chimneys reminded one of the Thames between Bat- 
tersea and Fulham. Coming into Garden Reach, where large 
ships anchor before they sail, we had a long, low building 
on our right, gaudy and architecturally hideous, but from 
its vast size almost imposing : it was th-e palace of the de- 
throned King of Oude, the place where, it is said, are carried 
on deeds become impossible in Lucknow. Such has been the 
extravagance of the king that the Government of India has 
lately interfered, and appointed a commission to pay his 
debts, and deduct them from his income of £120,000 a year; 
for we pay into the privy purse of the dethroned Vizier of 
Oude exactly twice the yearly sum that we set aside for that 
of Queen Victoria. Whatever income is allowed to native 
princes they always spend the double. The experience of 
the Dutch in Java and our own in India is uniform in this 
respect. Removed from that slight restraint upon expendi- 
ture which the fear of bankruptcy or revolution forces upon 
reigning kings, native princes supported by European Gov- 
ernments run recklessly into debt. The commission which 
was sitting upon the debts of the King of Oude while I was 
in Calcutta warned him that, if he offended a second time, 
Government would for the future spend his income for him. 
It is not the king's extravagance alone, however, that is 
♦ complained of. Always notorious for debauchery, he has 
now become infamous for his vices. One of his wives was ar- 
rested while I was in Calcutta for purchasing girls for the ha- 
rem, but the king himself escaped. For nine years he has nev- 
er left his palace, yet he spends, we are told, from i)200,00Q 
to £250,000 a year. 

In his extravagance and immorality the King of Oude 
does not stand alone in Calcutta, His mode of life is iiui- 



404 Greater Britain. 

tated by the wealthy natives ; his vices are mimicked by 
every young jj^engalee baboo. It is a question whether we 
are not responsible for the tone which has been taken by 
"civilization" in Calcutta. The old philosophy has gone, 
and left nothing in its place ; we have by moral force de- 
stroyed the old religions in Calcutta, but we have set up no 
new. Whether the character of our Indian Government, at 
once levelling and paternal, has not much to do with the 
spread of careless sensuality is a question before answering 
which it would be well to look to France, where a similar 
government has for sixteen years prevailed. In Paris, at 
least, democratic despotism is fast degrading the French cit- 
izen to the moral level of the Bengalee beboo. 

The first thing in Calcutta that I saw was the view of the 
Government-house from the Park Reserve — a miniature Sa- 
hara since its trees were destroyed by the great cyclone. 
The viceroy's dwelling, though crushed by groups of lions 
and unicorns of gigantic stature and astonishing design, is an 
imposing building ; but it is the only palace in the " city of 
palaces " — a name which must have been given to the pestif- 
erous city by some one who had never seen any other towns 
but Liverpool and London. The true city of palaces is 
Lucknow. 

In Calcutta I first became acquainted with that unbound- 
ed hospitality of the great mercantile houses in the East of 
which I have since acquired many pleasing remembrances. 
The luxury of " the firm " impresses the English traveller ; 
the huge house is kept as a hotel; every one is welcome to 
dinner, breakfast, and bed in the veranda, or in a room if he 
can sleep under a roof in the hot weather. Sometimes two 
and sometimes twenty sit down to the meals, and always 
without notice to the butlers or the cooks, but every one is 
welcome, down to the friend of a friend's friend; and junior 
clerks will write letters of introduction to members of the 
firm, which secure the bearer a most hospitable welcome from 
the other clerks, even when all the partners are away. " If 
Brown is not there. Smith will be, and if he's away, why 
then Johnson will put you up," is the form of invitation to 
the hospitalities of an Eastern firm. The finest of fruits are 
on table between five and six, and tea and iced drinks are 



Madras to Calcutta. 405 

ready at all times from dawn to breakfast — a ceremony which 
takes place at ten. To the regular meals you come in or 
not as you please, and no one trained in Calcutta or Bombay 
can conceive offense being taken by a host at his guest ac- 
cepting, without consulting him, invitations to dine out in 
the city, or to spend some days at a villa in its outskirts. 
Servants are in the corridors by day and night at the call of 
guests, and your entertainers tell you that, although tney 
have not time to go about with you, servants will always be 
ready to drive you at sunset to the band-stand in the carriage 
of some member of the firm. 

The population of Calcutta is as motley as that of Galle, 
though the constituents are not the same. Greeks, Armeni- 
ans, and Burmese, besides many Eurasians, or English-speak- 
ing half-castes, mingle with the mass of Indian Mohamme- 
dans and Hindoos. The hot weather having suddenly set in, 
the Calcutta officials, happier than the merchants — who, how- 
ever, care little about heat when trade is good — were start- 
ing for Simla in a body " just as they were warming to their 
work," as the Calcutta people say, and, finding that there 
was nothing to be done in the stifling city, I, too, determined 
to set off. 

The heat was great at night, and the noisy native crows 
and whistling kites held durbars inside my window in the 
only cool hour of the twenty-four — namely, that which be- 
gins at dawn — and thus hastened my departure from Calcut- 
ta by preventing me from taking .rest while in it. Hearing 
that at Patna there was nothing to be seen or learned, I trav- 
elled from Calcutta to Benares — 500 miles — in the same 
train and railway carriage. Our first long stoj)page was at 
Chandernagore, but as the native baggage-coolies or porters 
howl the station names in their own fashion, I hardly recog- 
nized the city in the melancholy moan of " Orn-dorn-orn- 
gorne," which welcomed the train, and it was not till I saw 
a French infantry uniform upon the platform that I remem- 
bered that Chandernagore, a village belonging to the French, 
lies hard by Calcutta, to which city it was once a dangerous 
rival. It is said that the French retain their Indian depend- 
encies instead of selling them to us as did the Dutch, in or- 
der that they may ever bear in mind the fact that we once 



406 Geeater Britain. 

conquered them in India, but it would be hard to find any- 
real ground for their retention unless they are held as centres 
for the Catholic missions. We will not even permit them to 
be made smuggling depots, for which purpose they would 
be excellently adapted. The whole of the possessions in In- 
dia of the French amount together to only twenty-six leagues 
square. Even Pondicherry, the largest and only French In- 
d^n dependency of which the name is often heard in Europe, 
is cut into several portions by strips of British territory, and 
the whole of the French-Indian dependencies are mere specks 
of land isolated in our vast territories. The officer who was 
lounging in the station was a native ; indeed, in the territory 
of Chandernagore there are but 230 Europeans, and but 1500 
in all French India. He made up to my compartment as 
though he would have got in, which I wished that he would 
have done, as natives in the French service all speak French, 
but seeing a European, he edged away to a dark uncomfort- 
able compartment. This action was, I fear, a piece of silent 
testimony to the prejudice which makes our people in Lidia 
almost invariably refuse to travel -with a native, whatever 
may be his rank. 

As we passed through Burdwan and Rajmahal, where the 
East Indian Railway taps the Ganges, the station scenes be- 
came more and more interesting. We associate with the 
word "railway" ideas that are peculiarly English — share- 
holders and directors, guards in blue, policemen in dark green, 
and porters in brown corduroy ; no English institution, how- 
ever, assumes more readily an Oriental dress. Station-mas- 
ters and sparrows alone are English ; every thing else on a 
Bengal railway is purely Eastern. Sikh irregulars jostle beg- 
ging fakeers in the stations; palkees and doolies — palan- 
keens and sedans, as we should call them — wait at the back- 
doors ; ticket-clerks smoke water-pipes ; an ibis drinks at the 
engine tank ; a sacred cow looks over the fence, and a tame 
elephant reaches up with his trunk at the telegraph wire, on 
which sits a hoopoe, while an Indian vulture crowns the post. 

Wlien we came opposite to the Monghyr Hills, the only 
natural objects which for 1600 miles break the level of the 
great plain of Hindostan, people of the central tribes, small- 
lie aded and savage-looking, were mingled with the Hindoos 



Madras to Calcutta. 407 

at the stations. In blackness there was not much difference 
between the races, for low-caste Bengalees are as black as 
Guinea negroes. 

As the day grew hot, a water-carrier with a well-filled skin 
upon his back appeared at every station, and came running 
to the native cars in answer to the universal long-drawn 
shout of "Ah! ah! Bheestie— e!" 

The first view of the Ganges calls up no enthusiasm.. The 
Thames below Gravesend half dried up would 1^ not unlike 
it ; indeed, the river itself is as ugly as the Mississippi or 
Missouri, while its banks are more hideous by far than theirs. 
Beyond Patna the plains, too, become as monotonous as the 
river — flat, dusty, and treeless, they are no way tropical in 
their character ; they lie, indeed, wholly outside the tropics. 
I afterward found that a man may cross India from the Ira- 
waddy to the Indus, and see no tropical scenery, no tropical 
cultivation. The aspect of the Ganges valley is that of Cam- 
bridgeshire, or of parts of Lincoln seen after harvest-time, 
and with flocks of strange and brilliant birds and an occasion- 
al jackal thrown in. The sun is hot — not, indeed, much hot- 
ter than in Australia, but the heat is of a different kind to 
that encountered by the English in Ceylon or the West In- 
dies. From a military point of view, the plains may be de- 
scribed as a parade-ground continued to infinity ; and this 
explains the success of our small forces against the rebels in 
1857, our calvary and artillery having in all cases swept 
their infantry from these levels with the utmost ease. 

A view over the plains by daylight is one which in former 
times some old Indians can never have enjoyed. Many a 
lady in the days of palki-dawk has passed a life in the Dec- 
can table-land without ever seeing a mountain, or knowing 
she was on the top of one. Carried up and down the ghauts 
at night, it was only by the tilting of her palki that she could 
detect the rise or fall, for day travelling for ladies was almost 
unknown in India before it was introduced with the railways. 

At Patna the station was filled with crowds of railway 
coolies, or navvies, as we should say, who, with their tools 
and baggage, were camped out upon the platform, smoking 
peacefully. I afterward found that natives have little idea 
of time-tables and departure hours. When they want to go 



408 Greater Britain. 

ten miles b#y railway they walk straight down to the nearest 
station, and there smoke their hookahs till the train arrives 
— at the end of twenty-four hours or ten minutes, as the case 
may be. There is but one step that the more ignorant 
among the natives are in a hurry to take, and that is to buy 
their tickets. They are no sooner come to the terminus than 
with one accord they rush at the native ticket-clerk, yelling • 
the name of the station to which they wish to go. In vain 
he declares ihat, the train not being due for ten or fifteen 
hours, there is plenty of time for the purchase. Open-mouth- 
ed, and wrought up almost to madness, the passengers dance 
round him, screaming " Burdwan !" or " Serampoor !" or what- 
ever the name may be, till at last he surrenders at discretion. 
There is often no room for all who wish to go ; indeed, the 
worst point about the management of the railways lies in the 
defective accommodation for the native passengers, and their 
treatment by the English station-masters is not always good : 
I saw them on many occasions terribly kicked and cuffed ; 
but Indian station-masters are not very highly paid, and are 
too often men who can not resist the temptations to violence 
which despotic power throws in their way. They might ask, 
with the Missourian in the United States army when he was 
accused of drunkenness, " Whether Uncle Sam expected to 
get all the cardinal virtues for fifteen dollars a month ?" 

The Indian railways are all made and worked by com- 
panies; but as tlje Government guarantees the interest of 
five per cent., which only the East Indian or Calcutta and 
Delhi line can pay, it. interferes much in the management. 
The telegraph is both made and worked by Government; 
and the reason why the railways were not put upon the same 
footing is that the Government of India was doubtful as to 
the wisdom of borrowing directly the vast sum required, and 
doubtful also of the possibility of borrowing it without dimin- 
ishing its credit. 

The most marked among the effects of railways upon the 
state of India are, as a moral change, the w^eakening of caste 
ties — as a physical, the destruction of the Indian forests. It 
is found that if a rich native discovers that he can, by losing 
caste in touching his inferiors, travel a certain distance in a 
comfortable second-class carriage for ten rupees, while a first- 



Benares. 409 

class ticket costs him twenty, he will often risk his caste to 
save his pound ; still caste yields but slowly to railways and 
the telegraph. It is but a very few years since one of my 
friends received a thousand rupees for pleading in a case which 
turned on the question whether the paint-spot on Krishna's 
nose, which is also a caste sign, should be drawn as a plain 
horizontal crescent, or with a pendant from the centre. It 
is only a year since, in Orissa, it was seen that Hmdoo peas- 
ants preferred cannibalism or death by starvation to defile- 
ment by eating their bullocks. 

As for the forests, their destruction has already in many 
places changed a somewhat moist climate to one of excessive 
drought, and planting is now taking place, with a view both 
to supplying the railway engines and bringing back the rains. 
On the East Indian line I found that they burned mixed coal 
and wood, but the Indian coal is scarce and bad, and lies en- 
tirely in shallow " pockets." 

The train reached Mogul-Serai, the ] unction for Benares, 
at midnight of the day following that on which it left Cal- 
cutta, and changing my carriage at once, I asked how long it 
would be before we started, to which the answer was, " half 
an hour ;" so I went to sleep. Immediately, as it seemed, I 
was awakened by whispering, and, turning, saw a crowd of 
boys and baggage-coolies at the carriage-door. When I tried 
to discover what they wanted my Hindostanee broke down, 
and it was some time before I found that I had slept through 
the short journey from Mogul-Serai, and had dozed on in the 
station till the lights had been put out before the coolies 
woke me. Crossing the, Ganges by the bridge of boats, I 
found myself in Benares, the ancient Yaranasi, and sacred 
capital of the Hindoos. 



CHAPTER TV. 

BENAEES. 

In the comparative cool of early morning I sallied out on 
a stroll through the outskirts of Benares. Thousands of 
women were stepping gracefully along the crowded roads, 
bearing on their heads the water-jars, while at every few 

_ S 



410 GrREATEK Britain. 

paces there was a well, at which hundreds were waiting 
along with the bheesties their turn for lowering their bright 
gleaming copper cups to the well-water to fill their skins or 
vases. All were keeping up a continual chatter, women with 
women, men with men : all the tongues were running cease- 
lessly. It is astonishing to see the indignation that a trifling 
mishap creates — such gesticulation, such shouting, and loud 
talk, you would think that murder at least was in question. 
The world can not show the Hindoo's equal as a babbler ; 
the women talk while they grind corn, the men while they 
smoke their water-pipes; your true Hindoo is never quiet; 
when not talking he is playing on his tomtom. 

The Doorgha Khond, the famed Temple of the Sacred 
Monkeys, I found thronged with worshipers and garlanded 
in every part with roses : it overhangs one of the best holy 
tanks in India, but has not much beauty or grandeur, and 
is chiefly remarkable for the swarms of huge, fat-paunched, 
yellow - bearded, holy monkeys, whose outposts hold one 
quarter of the city, and whose main body forms a living 
roof to the templf. A singular contrast to the Doorgha 
Khond was the Queen's College for native students, built in 
a mixture of Tudor and Hindoo architecture. The view 
from the ro,of is noticeable, depending as it does for its 
beauty on the mingling of the rich green of the timber with 
the gay colors of the painted native huts. Over the trees 
are seen the minarets at the river-side, and an unwonted life 
was given to the view by the smoke and flames that were 
rising from two burning huts in widely-separated districts 
of the native town. It is said that the natives, whenever 
they quarrel with their neighbors, always take the first op- 
portunity of firing their huts ; but in truth the huts in the 
hot weather almost fire themselves, so inflammable are their 
roofs and sides. 

When the sun had declined sufliciently to admit of an- 
other excursion I started from my bungalow, and, passing 
through the elephant-corral, went down with a guide to the 
ghauts, the observatory of Jai Singh, and the Golden Tem- 
ple. From the minarets of the Mosque of Aurungzebe I had 
a lovely sunset view of the ghauts, the city, and the Ganges ; 
but the real sight of Benares, after all, lies in a walk through 



Benares. 411 

the tortuous passages that do duty for streets. No carriages 
can pass them, they are so narrow. You walk preceded by 
your guide, who warns the people, that they may stand aside 
and not be defiled by your touch, for that is the real secret 
of the apparent respect paid to you in Benares ; but the sa- 
cred cows are so numerous and so obstinate that you can not 
avoid sometimes jostling them. The scene in the passages is 
the most Indian in India. The gaudy dresses of the Hindoo 
princes spending a week in purification at the holy place, the 
frescoed fronts of the shops and houses, the deafening beating 
of the tomtoms, and, above all, the smoke and sickening 
smell from the " burning ghauts " that meets you, mingled 
with a sweeter smell of burning spices, as you work your 
way through the vast crowds of pilgrims who are pouring 
up from the river's bank — all alike are strange to the En- 
glish traveller, and fill his mind with that indescribable awe 
which everywhere accompanies the sight of scenes and cere- 
monies that we do not understand. When once you are on 
the Ganges bank itself the scene is wilder still : a river-front 
of some three miles, faced with lofty ghauts or flights of river 
stairs, over which rise, pile above pile, in sublime confusion, 
lofty palaces with oriel window^s hanging over the sacred 
stream ; observatories with giant sun-dials, gilt domes {gold- 
671, the story runs), and silver minarets. On the ghauts, rows 
of fires, each with a smouldering body ; on the river, boat- 
loads of pilgrims and fakeers, praying while they float; 
under the houses, lines of prostrate bodies — those of the sick 
— brought to the sacred Ganges to die — or, say our Govern- 
ment spies, to be murdered by sufibcation with sacred mud, 
while prowling about are the wolf-like fanatics who feed on pu- 
trid flesh. The whole is lit by a sickly sun fitfully glaring 
through the smoke, while the Ganges stream is half obscured 
by the river fog and reek of the hot earth. 

The lofty pavilions that crown the river-front are orna- 
mented with paintings of every beast that walks and bird 
that flies, with monsters, too — pink and green and spotted — 
with griffins, dragons, and elephant-headed gods embracing 
dancing-girls. Here and there are representations of red- 
coated soldiers — English, it would seem, for they have white 
faces, but so, the Maories say, have the New Zealand fairies, 



412 Greater Britain. 

who are certainly not British. The Benares taste for paint- 
ing leads to the decoration with pink and yellow spots of the 
very cows. The tiger is the commonest of all the figures 
on the walls ; indeed, the explanation that the representa- 
tions are allegorical, or that gods are pictured in tiger shape, 
has not removed from my mind the belief that the tiger 
must have been worshiped in India at some early date. All 
Easterns are inclined to worship the beasts that eat them : 
the Javanese light floating sacrifices to their river crocodiles ; 
the Scindees at Kurrachee venerate the sacred mugger, or 
man-eating alligator; the hill-tribes pray to snakes; indeed, 
to a new-comer, all Indian religion has the air of devil-wor- 
ship, or worship of the destructive principle in some shape : 
the gods are drawn as grinning fiends, they are propitiated 
by infernal music, they are often worshiped with obscene and 
hideous rites. There is even something cruel in the* monot- 
onous roar of the great tomtoms ; the sound seems to con- 
nect itself with widow-burning, with child-murder, with Jug- 
gernauth processions. Since the earliest known times the tom- 
tom has been used to drown the cries of tortured fanatics ; its 
booming is bound up with the thousand barbarisms of false 
religion. If the scene on the Benares ghauts is full of hor- 
rors, we must not forget that Hindooism is a creed of fear 
and horror, not of love. 

The Government of India has lately instituted an inquiry 
into the alleged abuses of the custom of taking sick Hindoos 
to the Ganges-side to die, with a view to regulating or sup- 
pressing the practice which prevails in the river-side portion 
of Lower Bengal. At Benares Bengal people are still taken 
to the river-side, but not so other natives, as Hindoos dying 
anywhere in the sacred city have all the blessings which 
the most holy death can possibly secure ; the Benares Shas- 
tra, moreover, forbids the practice, and I saw but two cases 
of it in the city, although I had seen many near Calcutta. 
Not only are aged people brought from their sick-rooms, laid 
in the burning sun, and half suffocated with the Ganges water 
poured down their throats, but, owing to the ridicule which 
follows if they recover, or the selfishness of their relatives, 
the water is often muddier than it need be ; hence the phrase 
" ghaut murder," by which this custom is generally known. 



Benares. 413 

Similar customs are not unheard of in other parts of India, 
and even in Polynesia and North America. The Veddahs or 
black aborigines of Ceylon were, up to very lately, in the 
habit of carrying their dying parents or children into the 
jungle, and, having placed a chatty of water and some rice 
by their side, leaving them to be devoured by wild beasts. 
Under pressure from our officials they are believed to have 
ceased to act thus, but they continue, we are told, to throw 
their dead to the leopards and crocodiles. The Maories, too, 
have a way of taking out to die alone those whom their seers 
have pronounced doomed men, but it is probable that among 
the rude races the custom which seems to be a relic of human 
sacrifice has not been so grossly abused as it has been by the 
Bengal Hindoos. The practice of Ganjatra is but one out of 
many similar barbarities that disgrace the religion of the 
Hindoos, but it is fast sharing the fate of suttee and infanti- 
cide. 

As I returned through the bazar I met many most unholy- 
looking visitors to the sacred town. Fierce Rajpoots, with 
enormous turbans ornamented with zigzag stripes ; Bengal 
bankers, in large purple turbans, curling their long white 
mustaches, and bearing their critical noses high aloft as they 
daintily picked their way over the garbage of the streets ; 
and savage retainers of the rajahs staying for a season at 
their city palaces, were to the traveller's eye no very devout 
pilgrims. In truth, the immoralities of the " holy city " are 
as great as its religious virtues, and it is the chosen ground 
of the loose characters as well as of the pilgrims of the Hin- 
doo world. 

In the whole of the great throng in the bazar hardly the 
slightest trace of Europeaif dressing was to be perceived : 
the varnished boots of the wealthier Hindoos alone bore wit- 
ness to the existence of English trade — a singular piece of 
testimony, this, to the essential conservatism of the Oriental 
mind. With any quantity of old army clothing to be got 
for the asking, you never see a rag of it on a native back — • 
not even on that of the poorest coolie. If you give a blanket 
to an out-door servant he will cut it into strips, and wear 
them as a puggree round his head ; but this is about the only 
thing he will accept, unless to sell it in the bazar. 



414 Greater Britain. 

As I stopped to look for a moment at the long trains of 
laden camels that were winding slowly through the tortu- 
ous streets I saw a European soldier cheapening a bracelet 
with a native jeweller. He was the first topees-wallah (" hat- 
fellow," or "European") that I had seen in Benares city. 
Calcutta is the only town in iNforthern India in which you 
meet Europeans in your walks or rides, and even there there 
is but one European to every sixty natives. In all India, 
there are, including troops, children, and ofiicials of all kinds, 
far less than as many thousands of Europeans as there are 
millions of natives. 

The evening after that on which I visited the native town I 
saw in Secrole cantonments, near Benares, the India hated and 
dreaded by our troops — by day a blazing deadly heat and sun, 
at night a still more deadly fog — a hot white fog, into which 
the sun disappears half an hour before his time for setting, 
and out of which he shoots soon after seven in the morning, 
to blaze and kill again — a pestiferous, fever-breeding ground- 
fog, out of which stand the tops of the palms, though their 
stems are invisible in the steam. Compared with our En- 
glish summer climate, it seems the atmosphere of another 
planet. 

Among the men in the cantonments I found much of that 
demoralization that heat everywhere produces among En- 
glishmen. The newly-arrived soldiers appear to pass their 
days in alternate trials of hard drinking and of total absti- 
nence, and are continually in a state of nervous fright, which 
in time must wear them out and make them an easy prey to 
fever. The officers who are fresh from England often behave 
in much the same manner as the men, though with them 
" belatee pawnee " takes the pTfice of plain water with the 
brandy. " Belatee pawnee " means, being translated, " En- 
glish water," but when interpreted it means " soda-water " — 
the natives once believing that this was English river-water, 
bottled and brought to India by us as they carry Ganges 
water to the remotest parts. The superstition is now at an 
end, owing to the fact that natives are themselves largely 
employed in the making of soda-water, which is cheaper in 
India than it is at home ; but the name remains. 

Our men kill themselves with beer, with brandy and soda- 



Caste. 415 

water, and with careless inattention to night chills, and then 
blame the poor climate for their fevers, or die cursing "In- 
dia." Of course long residence in a climate winterless and 
always hot at midday produces or intensifies certain diseases ; 
but brandy and soda-water produces more, and intensifies all. 
They say it is " soda-and-brandy " the first month, and then 
" brandy-and-soda," but that men finally take to putting in 
the soda-water first, and then somehow the brandy always 
kills them. If a man wears a flannel belt and thick clothes 
w^hen he travels by night, and drinks hot tea, he need not 
fear India. . 

In all ways Benares is the type of India: in the Secrole 
cantonments you have the English in India, intelligent enough, 
but careless, and more English than they are at home, with 
garrison chaplains, picnics, balls, and champagne suppers; 
hard by, in the native town, the fierce side of Hindooism, and 
streets for an Englishman to show himself in which ten years 
ago was almost certain death. Benares is the centre of all 
the political intrigues of India, but the gr6at mutiny itself 
was hatched there without being heard of at Secrole. Ex- 
cept that our policemen now perambulate the town, change 
in Benares there has been none. Were missionaries to appear 
openly in its streets their fate would still very possibly be 
the same as that which in this city befell St. Thomas. 



CHAPTER Y. 

CASTE. 

Ojte of the greatest difiiculties with which the British 
have to contend in Hindostan is how to discover the tenden- 
cies, how to follow the changes, of native opinion. Your Hin- 
doo is so complaisant a companion that, whether he is your 
servant at threepence a day or the ruler of the State in which 
you dwell, he is perpetually striving to make his opinions the 
reflex of your own. You are engaged in a continual strug- 
gle to prevent your views from being seen in order that you 
may get at his: in this you always fail; a slight hint is 
enough for a Hindoo, and, if he can not find even that much 



416 Gkeater Britaiist. 

of suggestion in your words, he confines himself to common- 
place. We should see in this not so much one of the forms 
assumed by the cringing slavishness born of centuries of sub- 
jection, not so much an example of Oriental cunning, as of 
the polish of Eastern manners. Even in our rude country it 
is hardly courteous, whatever your opinions, flatly to contra- 
dict the man with whom you happen to be talking ; with the 
Hindoo it is the height of ill-breeding so much as to differ 
from him. The results of the practice are deplorable ; our 
utter ignorance of the secret history of the rebellion of 1857 
is an example of its working, ^br there must have been a time, 
before discontent ripened into conspiracy, when we might 
have been advised and warned. The native newsj)apers are 
worse than useless to *us ; accepted as exponents of Hindoo 
views by those who know no better, and founded mostly by 
British capital, they are at once incapable of directing and of 
acting as indexes to native opinion, and express only the sen- 
timents of half a dozen small merchants at the presidency 
towns, who give the tone to some two or three papers, which 
are copied and followed by the remainder. 

The result of this difficulty in discovering native o*pin- 
ion is that our officers, however careful, however considerate 
in their bearing toward the natives, daily wound the feel- 
ings of the people who are under their care by acts which, 
though done in a praiseworthy spirit, appear to the natives 
deeds of gross stupidity or of outrageous despotism. It is 
hopeless to attempt to conciliate, it is impossible so much 
as to govern, unless by main force continually displayed, an 
Eastern people in whose religious thought we are not deeply 
learned. 

Not only are we unacquainted with the feelings of the 
people, but we are lamentably ignorant of the simplest facts 
about their religions, their wealth, and their occupations, for 
no census of all Lidia has yet been taken. A complete cen- 
sus had, indeed, been taken, not long before my visit ; in Cen- 
tral India, and another in the North-west Provinces, but none 
in Madras, Bombay, the Punjaub, or Bengal. The difficulties 
in the way of the officials who carried through the arrange- 
ments for the two that had been taken were singularly great. 
In the Central Provinces the census-papers had to be pre- 



^ Cas5?e. 417 

pared in five languages; both here and in the North-west 
the purely scientific nature of the inquiry had to be brought 
home to the minds of the people. In Central India the hill- 
tribes believed that our object in the census was to pave 
the way for the collection of the unmarried girls as compan- 
ions for our wifeless soldiers, so all began marrying forth- 
with. In the N'orth-west the natives took it into their heads 
that our object was to see how many able-bodied men would 
be available for a war against Russia, and to collect a poll- 
tax to pay for the expedition. The numerous tribes that are 
habitually guilty of infanticide threw every difiiculty in the 
way ; Europeans disliked the whole affair, on account of the 
insult offered to their dignity in ranking them along with 
natives. It must be admitted, indeed, that the provisions for 
recording caste distinctions gave an odd shape to the census- 
papers left at the houses at Secrole, in which European offi- 
cers were asked to state their " caste or tribe." The census 
of the Central Provinces was imperfect enough, but that of 
the North-west was the second that had been taken there, 
and showed signs of scientific arrangement and great care. 

The North-\v est Provinces include the great towns of Be- 
nares, Agra, and Allahabad, and the census fell into my hands 
at Benares itself, at the Sanscrit College. It was a strange 
production, and seemed to have brought together a mass of 
information respecting castes and creeds which was new even 
to those who had lived long in the North-west Provinces. 
All callings in India being hereditary, there were entries re- 
cording the presence in certain towns of " hereditary clerks 
who pray to their ink-horns," " hereditary beggars," " heredi- 
tary planters of slips or cuttings," "hereditary grave-dig- 
gers," " hereditary hermits," and " hereditary hangmen," for 
in India a hangmanship descends with as much regularity as 
a crown. In the single district of the Dehra Yalley there 
are 1500 "hereditary tomtom men" — drummers at the festi- 
vals; 234 Brahmin of Bijnour returned themselves as having 
for profession " the receipt of presents to avert the influence 
of evil stars." In Bijnour there are also fifteen people of a 
caste which professes " the pleasing of people by assuming 
disguises," while at Benares there is a whole caste — the Bhats 
—whose hereditary occupation is to " satirize the enemies of 

S 2 



418 Greatee Britain. 

the rich, and to praise their friends." In the North-west 
Provinces there are 5*72 distinct castes in all. 

The accounts which some castes gave of their origin read 
strangely in a solemn governmental document : the members 
of one caste described themselves as " descended from Mai- 
casur, a demon ;" but some of the records are less legendary 
and more historic. One caste in the Dehra Valley sent in a 
note that they came in 1000 a.d. from the Deccan; another 
that they emigrated from Arabia 500 years ago. The Gour 
Brahmins claim to have been in the district of Moozuffer- 
nuggur for 5000 years. 

Under the title of " occupations " the heads of families 
alone were given, and not the number of those dependent on 
them, whence it comes that in the whole province only " 11,000 
tomtom-players " were set down. The habits and tastes of 
the people are easily seen in the entries: "3600 fire-work 
manufacturers," "45 makers of crowns for idols," "4353 gold- 
bangle makers," "29,136 glass-bangle makers," "1123 astrol- 
ogers." There are also 145 "ear-cleaners," besides "kite- 
makers," " ear-piercers," " pedigree-makers," " makers of caste- 
marks," " cow-dung sellers," and " hereditary painters of 
horses with spots." There was no backwardness in the fol- 
lowers of maligned pursuits : 974 people in Allahabad de- 
scribed themselves as "low blackguards," 35 as "men who 
beg with threats of violence," 25 as " hereditary robbers," 
479,015 as "beggars," 29 as "howlers at funerals," 226 as 
" flatterers for gain ;" " vagabonds," " charmers," " inform- 
ers" were all set down, and 1100 returned themselves as 
" hereditary buffoons," while 2000 styled themselves " con- 
jurers," 4000 " acrobats," and 6372 " poets." In one district 
alone there were 777 " sooth-say ers and astrologers" by pro- 
fession. 

It is worthy of notice that, although there are in the 
North-west Provinces half a million of beggars in a popula- 
tion of thirty millions, they seem never to beg of Europeans 
— at least I was not once asked for alms during my stay in 
India. If the smallest service be performed there comes a 
howl of " Oh, bauks-heece !" from all quarters, but at other 
times natives seem afraid to beg of Englishmen. 

The number of fakeers, soothsayers, charmers, and other 



Caste. 419 

" religious " vagabonds is enormous, but the dense ignorance 
of the people renders them a prey to witchcraft, evil-eye, devil- 
influence, and all such folly. In Central India there are 
whole districts which are looked upon as witch-tracts or 
haunted places, and which are never approached by man, but 
set aside as homes for devils. A gentleman who was lately 
engaged there on the railroad survey found that night after 
night his men were frightened out of their wits by " fire- 
fiends " or blazing demons. He insisted that they should 
take him to the spot where these strange sights were seen, 
and to his amazement he too saw the fire-devil ; at least he 
saw a blaze of light moving slowly through the jungle. 
Gathering himself up for a chase, he rushed at the devil with 
a club, when the light suddenly disappeared, and instantly 
shone out from another spot, a hundred yards from the former 
place. Seeing that there was some trickery at work, he hid 
himself, and after some hours caught his devil, who, to escape 
from a sound drubbing, gave an exj)lanation of the whole af- 
fair. The man said that the natives of the surveyor's party 
had stolen his mangoes for several nights, but that at last he 
had hit on a plan for frightening them away. He and his 
sons went out at dark with pots of blazing oil upon their 
heads, and when approached by thieves the leading one put 
a cover on his pot, and became invisible, while the second 
uncovered his. The surveying party got the drubbing,^ and 
the devil escaped scot-free; but the surveyor, with short- 
sighted wisdom, told his men, who had not seen him catch 
the fire-bearer, that he had had the honor of an interview with 
the devil himself, who had joyfully informed him of the thefts 
committed by the men. The surveyor did not admit that he 
was from this time forward worshiped by his party, but it is 
not unlikely that such was the case. One of the hill-tribes 
of Madras -worships Colonel Palmer, a British ofiicer who 
died some seventy years ago, just as Drake was worshiped in 
America, and Captain Cook in Hawaii. It was one of these 
tribes that invented the well-known worshiping machine or 
" praying- wheel." 

The hill-tribes are less refined but hardly more ignorant in 
their fanaticism than are the Hindoos. At Bombay, upon 
the beach where the dead are buried, or rather tossed to the 



420 Greater Britain. 

wild beasts, I saw a filthy and holy Hindoo saint, whose 
claim to veneration consists in his having spent the whole of 
the days and portions of the nights for twenty years in a stone 
box in which he can neither stand, nor lie, nor sit, nor sleep. 
These saintly fakeers have still much influence with the Hin- 
doo mass, but in old times their power and their insolence 
were alike unbounded. Agra itself was founded to please 
one of them. The great Emperor Akbar, who, although a 
lax Mohammedan, was in no sense a Hindoo, kept neverthe- 
less a Hindoo saint for political purposes, and gave him the 
foremost position in his train. When the Emperor was be- 
ginning to fortify Futtehpore Sikri, where he lived, the saint 
sent for him, and said that the work must be stopped, as the 
noise disturbed him at his prayers. The Emperor offered 
him new rooms away from the site of the proposed walls, 
but the saint replied that, whether Akb^r went on with his 
works or no, he should leave Futtehpore. To pacify him, 
Akbar founded Agra, and dismantled Futtehpore Sikri. 

From the census it appears that there are in the North- 
west Provinces no less than twenty-two newspapers under 
Government inspection, of which five are published at Agra. 
The circulation of these papers is extremely small, and as 
the Government itself takes 3500 of the 12,000 copies which 
they issue, its hold over them, without exertion of force, is 
great. Of the other 8500, 8000 go to native and 500 to Eu- 
ropean subscribers. All the native papers are skillful at 
catering for their double public, but those which are printed 
half in a native tongue and half in English stand in the first 
rank for unscrupulousness. One of these papers gave, while 
I was in India, some French speech in abuse of the English. 
This was headed on the English side ^^Interesting Account 
of the English," but on the native side ^^Mccellent Account 
of the English." The "English correspondence" and En- 
glish news of these native papers is so absurdly concocted by 
the editors out of their own brains that it is a question 
whether it would not be advisable to send them weekly a 
column of European news, and even to withhold Government 
patronage from them unless they gave it room, leaving them 
to qualify and explain the facts as best they could. Their 
favorite statements are that Russia is going to invade India 



Caste. 421 

forthwith, that the queen has become a Catholic or a Mo- 
hammedan, and that the whole population of India is to be 
converted to Christianity by force. The external appear- 
ance of the native papers is sometimes as comical as their 
matter. The Umritsur Gomrnercial Advertiser^ oiw\i\Qh.i[ioih- 
ing is English but the title, gives, for instance, the time-tables 
of the Punjaub Railway on its back sheet. The page, which 
is a mere maze of dots and crooked lines, has at the top a cut 
of a railway train, in which guards apparently cocked-hatted, 
but probably meant to be wearing pith helmets, are repre- 
sented sitting on the top of each carriage with their legs 
dangling down in front of the windows. 

Neither Christianity nor native reformed religions make 
much show in the North-western census. The Christians 
are strongest in the South of India, the Hindoo reformers in 
the Punjaub. The Sikhs themselves, and the Kookhas, Ni- 
runkarees, Goolab Dasseas, Naukeeka-punth, and many other 
Punjaubee sects, all show more or less hostility to caste; 
but in the North-west Provinces caste distinctions flourish, 
although in reality they have no doubt lost strength. The 
high-caste men are beginning to find their caste a drawback 
to their success in life, and are given to concealing it. Just 
as with ourselves kings go incognito when they travel for 
pleasure, so the Bengal sepoy hides his Brahminical string 
under his cloth, in order that he may be sent on foreign serv- 
ice without its being known that by crossing the seas he will 
lose caste. 

Judging by the unanimous opinion of the native press on 
the doings of the Maharajahs of Bombay, and on the licen- 
tiousness of the Koolin Brahmins, many of our civilians have 
come to think that Hindooism in its present shape had lost 
the support of a large number of the more intelligent Hin- 
doos, but there is little real reason to believe that this is the 
case. In Calcutta the Church of Hindoo Deists is gaining 
ground, and one of their leaders is said to have met with 
some successes during a recent expedition to the North- 
west, but of this there is no proof. The little regard that 
many high-caste natives show for caste except as a matter 
of talk merely means that caste is less an affair of religion 
than of custom, but that it is a matter of custom does not 



422 Greater Britain. 

show that its force is slight ; on the contrary, custom is the 
lord of India. 

The success of Mohammedanism in India should show 
that caste has never been strong except so far as caste is cus- 
tom. It is true that the peasants in Orissa starved by the 
side of the sacred cows, but this was custom too : any one 
man killing the cow would have been at once killed by his 
also starving neighbors for breaking custom ; but once change 
the custom by force, and there is no tendency to return to 
the former state of things. The Portuguese and the Moham-- 
medans alike made converts by compulsion, yet when the 
pressure was removed there was no return to the earlier faith. 
Of the nature of caste we had an excellent example in the 
behavior of the troopers of a Bengal cavalry regiment three 
weeks before the outbreak of the mutiny of 1857, when they 
said that for their part they .knew that their cartridges were 
not greased with the fat of cows, but that, as they looked as 
though they were, it came to the same thing, for they should 
lose caste if their friends saw them touch the cartridges in 
question. 

It was the cry of infringement of custom that was raised 
against us by the mutineers: "They aim at subverting our 
institutions; they have put down the suttee of the Brahmins, 
the infanticide of the Marattas, caste and adoption are de- 
spised ; they aim at destroying all our religious customs," 
was the most powerful cry that could be raised. It is one 
against which we shall never be wholly safe ; but it is the cus- 
tom and not the religion which is the people's especial care. 

There is one point in which caste forms a singular difficulty 
in our way which has not yet been brought sufficiently home 
to us. The comparatively fair treatment which is now ex- 
tended to the low-caste and no-caste men is itself an insult to 
the high-caste nobility; and while the no-caste men care 
little how we treat them provided we pay them well, and the 
bunnya, or shop-keeping class, encouraged by the improve- 
ment, cry out loudly that the Government wrongs them in 
not treating them as Europeans, the high-caste men are 
equally disgusted with our good treatment both of middle- 
class and inferior Hindoos. These things are stumbling- 
blocks in our way chiefly because no amount of acquaintance 



Caste. 423 

with the various phases of caste feeling is sufficient to bring 
home its importance to Englishmen. The Indian is essen- 
tially the caste man, the Saxon as characteristically the no- 
caste man, and it is difficult to produce a mutual understand- 
ing. Just as in England the people are too democratic for 
the Government, in India the Government is too democratic 
for the people. 

Although caste has hitherto been but little shaken, there 
are forces at work which must in time produce the most grave 
results. The return to their homes of natives who have emi- 
grated and worked at sugar-planting in Mauritius and coffee- 
growing in Ceylon, mixing with negroes and with Europeans, 
will gradually aid in the subversion of caste distinctions, and 
the Parsees will give their help toward the creation of a health- 
ier feeling. The young men of the merchant-class — who are 
all pure deists — set an* example of doing away with caste 
distinctions which will gradually affect the whole population 
of the towns; railways will act upon the laborers and ag- 
riculturist ; as closer intercourse with Europe will possibly 
go hand in hand with universal instruction in the English 
tongue, and the indirect results of Christian teaching will 
continue to be, as they have been, great. 

The positive results of missionary work in India have hith- 
erto been small. Taking the census as a guide, in the dis- 
trict of Mooradabad we find but 107 Christians in 1,100,000 
people ; in Budaon 64 " Christians, Europeans, and Eurasians" 
(half-castes), out of 900,000 people ; in Bareilly 137 native 
Christians in a million and a half of people ; in Shajehanpoor 
98 in a million people ; in Turrai none in a million people ; 
in Etah no native Christians, and only twenty Europeans to 
614,000 people ; in the Banda district thirteen native Chris- 
tians out of three-quarters of a million of people ; in Goruck- 
poor 100 native Christians out of three and a half millions of 
people. ]^ot to multiply instances, this projDortion is pre- 
served throughout the whole of the districts, and the native 
Christians in the Xorth-west are j^roved to form but an in- 
significant fraction of the population. 

The number of native Christians in India is extremely 
small. Twenty-three societies, having tliree hundred Protest- 
ant missionary stations, more than three hundred native mis- 



424 Greater Britain. 

sionary churches, and five hundred European preachers, cost- 
ing Avith then- assistants two hundred thousand pounds a year, 
profess to show only a hundred and fifty thousand converts, 
of whom one-seventh are communicants. The majority of 
the converts who are not communicants are converts only 
upon paper, and it may be said that of real native non-Catho- 
lic Christians there are not in India more than 40,000, of 
whom half are to be found among the devil-worshipers of 
Madras. The so-called " aboriginal " hill-tribes, having no 
elaborate religious system of their own, are not tied down to 
the creed of their birth in the same way as are Mohammedans 
and Hindoos, among whom our missionaries make no way 
whatever. The native Protestant's position is a fearful one, 
except in such a city as Madras, for he wholly loses caste, 
and becomes an outlaw from his people. The native Catholic 
continues to be a caste man, and sometimes an idol-worship- 
er, and the priests have made a million converts in Southern 
India. 

Besides revealing the fewness of the native Christians, the 
North-western census has shown us plainly the weakness of 
the Europeans. In the district of Mooradabad 1,100,000 peo- 
ple are ruled by thirty-eight Europeans. In many places 
two Europeans watch over 200,000 people. The Eurasians 
are about as numerous as the Europeans, to which class they 
may for some purposes be regarded as belonging, for the na- 
tives reject their society, and refuse them a place in every 
caste. The Eurasians are a much-despised race, the butt of 
every Indian story, but as a community they are not to be 
ranked high. That they should be ill-educated, vain, and 
cringing, is perhaps only what we might expect of persons 
placed in their difficult position ; nevertheless that they are 
so tends to lessen, in spite of our better feelings, the pity that 
we should otherwise extend toward them. 

The census had not only its revelations, but its results. 
One effect of the census-taking is ta check the practice of in- 
fanticide, by pointing out to the notice of our officers the 
castes and the districts in which it exists. The deaths of three 
or four hundred children are credited to the wolves in the 
Umritsur district of the Punjaub alone, but it is remarked 
that the " wolves " pick out the female infants. The great 



Mohammedan Cities. 425 

disproportion of the sexes is itself partly to be explained as 
the result of infanticide. 

One weighty drawback to our influence upon Hindoo mor- 
als is that in the case of many abuses we legislate without 
effect, our laws being evaded where they are outwardly obey- 
ed. The practice of infanticide exists in all parts of India, 
but especially in Kajpootana, and the girls are killed chiefly 
in order to save the cost of marrying them — or, rather, of buy- 
ing husbands for them. l!^ow we have " suppressed" infanti- 
cide — which means that children are smothered or starved, 
instead of being exposed. It is no easy task to bring about 
reforms in the customs of the people of India. 

The many improvements in the moral condition of the peo- 
ple which the census chronicles are steps in a great march. 
Those who have known India long are aware that a remark- 
able change has come over the country in the last few years. 
Small as have been the positive visible results of Christian 
teaching, the indirect effects have been enormous. Among 
the Sikhs and Marattas a spirit of reflection, of earnest 
thought, unusual in natives, has been aroused ; in Bengal it 
has taken the form of pure deism, but then Bengal is not In- 
dia. The spirit rather than the doctrinal teaching of Chris- 
tianity has been imbibed : a love of truth appeals more to 
the feelings of the upright natives than do the whole of the 
nine-and-thirty Articles. Here, as elsewhere, the natives look 
to deeds, not words ; the example of a Frere is worth the 
teaching of a hundred missionaries, painstaking and earnest 
though they be. 



CHAPTER VI.. 

MOHAMMEDAN" CITIES. 



Through Mirzapore, Allahabad, and Futtehpore I passed 
on to Cawnpore, spending but little time at Allahabad ; for 
though the city is strategically important there is in it but lit- 
tle to be seen. Like all spots of the confluence of rivers, Alla- 
habad is sacred with the Hindoos, for it stands, they say, at 
the meeting-point of no less than three great streams — the 
Ganges, the Jumna, and a river of the spirit-land. To us poor 



426 Greater Britain. 

pagans the third stream is invisible ; not so to the faithful. 
Catching a glimpse of Marochetti's statue at the Cawnpore 
well, as I hurried through that city, I diverged from the East 
Indian Railway, and took dawk-carriage to Lucknow. 

As compared with other Indian cities, the capital of Oude 
is a town to be seen in driving rather than in walking ; the 
general effects are superior in charm and beauty to the de- 
tails, and the vast size of the city makes mere sight-seeing a 
work of difficulty. More populous before 1857 than either 
Calcutta or Bombay, it is still twice as large as Liverpool. 
Not only, however, is Lucknow the most perfect of the mod- 
ern or Italianized Oriental towns, but there are in it several 
buildings that have each the charm of an architecture special 
to itself Oi these the Martiniere is the most singular, and it 
looks like what it is — the freak of a wealthy madman. Its 
builder was General Martine, a Frenchman in the service of 
the Kings of Oude. Not far behind the Martiniere is the 
Dilkousha — a fantastic specimen of an Oriental hunting- 
lodge. The ordinary show-building of the place, the Kaiser- 
bagh, or Palace of the Kings of Oud6, is a paltry place enough, 
but there is a certain grandeur in the view of the great Im- 
aumbara and the Hooseinabad from a point whence the two 
piles form to the eye but one. The gpeat Imaumbara suffer- 
ed terribly in 1858 from the wanton destruction which our 
troops committed everywhere during the war of the mutiny. 
Had they confined themselves to outrages such as these, how- 
ever, but little could have been said against the conduct of 
the war. There is too much fear that the English, unless 
held in check, exhibit a singularly strong disposition toward 
cruelty wherever they have a weak enemy to meet. 

The stories of the Indian mutiny and of the Jamaica riot 
are but two out of many — two that we happen to have heard : 
but the Persian war in 1857 and the last of the Chinese cam- 
paigns are not without their records of deliberate barbarity 
and wrong. From the first officer of one of the Peninsular 
and Oriental steamers, which was employed in carrying troops 
up the Euphrates during the Persian war, I heard a story that 
is the type of many such. A Persian drummer-boy of about 
ten years old was seen bathing from the bank one morning 
by the officers on deck. Bets were made as to the chance of 



Mohammedan Cities. 427 

hitting him with an Enfield rifle, and one of the betters killed 
him at the first shot. 

It is not only in war-time that our cruelty comes out ; it 
is often seen in trifles during peace. Even a traveller in- 
deed becomes so soon used to see the natives wronged in 
every way by people of quiet manner and apparent kindness 
of disposition, that he ceases to record the cases. In Ma- 
dras Roads, for instance, I saw a fruit-seller hand up some 
limes to a lower-deck port just as we were weighing anchor. 
Three Anglo-Indians (men who had been out "before) asked 
in chorus "How much?" "One-quarter rupee." "Too 
much." And, without more ado, paying nothing, they pelted 
the man with his own limes, of which he lost more than half. 
In Ceylon, near Bentotte rest-house, a native child ofiered a 
handsome cowrie (of a kind worth in Australia about five 
shillings, and certainly worth something in Ceylon) to the 
child of a Mauritius cofiee-planter who was travelling with 
us to Columbo, himself an old Indian officer. The white 
child took it, and would not give it up. The native child 
cried for money, or to have his shell back, but the mother of 
the white child exclaimed, " You be hanged ; it's worth noth- 
ing ;" and off came the shell with us in the dawk. Such 
are the small but galling wrongs inflicted daily upon the 
Indian natives. It was a maxim of the Portuguese Jesuits 
that men who live long among Asiatics seldom fail to learn 
their vices, but our older civilians treat the natives with strict 
justice, and Anglo-Indian ladies who have been reared in the 
country are generally kind to their own servants, if some- 
what harsh toward other natives. It is those who have been 
in the country from five to ten years, and especially soldiers, 
who treat the natives badly. Such men I have heard exclaim 
that the /new penal code has revolutionized the country. 
" Formerly," they say, " you used to send a man to a police 

officer or a magistrate with a note : — * My dear , Please 

give the bearer twenty lashes.' But now the magistrates are 
afraid to act, and your servant can have you fined for beat- 
ing him." In spite of the lamentations of Anglo-Indians over 
the good old days, I noticed in all the hotels in India the sig- 
nificant notice, " Gentlemen are earnestly requested not to 
strike the servants." 



428 Greater Britain. 

The jokes of a people against themselves are not worth 
much, but may be taken in aid of other evidence. The two fa- 
vorite Anglo-Indian stories are that of the native who, being 
asked his religion, said, " Me Christian — me get drunk like 
massa ;" and that of the young officer who, learning Hindos- 
tanee in 1858, had the difference between the negative " ne" 
and the particle " ne " explained to him by the moonshee, 
when he exclaimed : " Dear me ! I hanged lots of natives 
last year for admitting that they had not been in theii* vil- 
lages for months. I suppose they meant to say that they 
had not left their villages for months." It is certain that in 
the suppression of the mutiny hunda'eds of natives were hang- 
ed by queen's officers who, unable to speak a word of any 
native language, could neither understand evidence nor de- 
fense. 

It is in India, when listening to a mess-table conversation 
on the subject of looting that we begin to remember our de- 
scent from Scandinavian sea-king robbers. Centuries of ed- 
ucation have not purified the blood ; our men in India can 
hardly set eyes upon a native prin-ce or a Hindoo* palace be- 
fore they cry, " What a place to hredk up .'"' " What a fellow 
to loot P^ When I said to an officer who had been stationed 
at Secrole in the early days of the mutiny, " I suppose you 
were afraid that the Benares people would have attacked 
you," his answer was, " Well, for my part, I rather hoped 
they would, because then we should have thrashed them, 
and looted the city. It hadn't been looted for two hundred 
years." 

Those who doubt that Indian military service makes sol- 
diers careless of men's lives, reckless as to the rights of prop- 
erty, and disregardful of human dignity, can hardly remem- 
ber the letters which reached home in 1857, in which an of- 
ficer in high command during the march upon Cawnpore re- 
ported, " Good bag to-day ; polished off — — rebels ;" it being 
borne in mind that the " rebels " thus hanged or blown from 
guns were not taken in arms, but villagers apprehended " on 
suspicion." During this march atrocities were committed 
in the burning of villages and massacre of innocent inhab- 
itants at which Mohammed Togluk himself would have stood 
ashamed, and it would be to contradict all history to assert 



Mohammedan Cities. 429 

that a succession of such deeds would not prove fatal to our 
liberties at home. 

The European officers of native regiments, and many offi- 
cers formerly in the Company's service, habitually show 
great kindness to the natives, but it is the benevolent kind- 
ness of the master for a fa-vorite slave, of the superior for 
men immeasurably beneath him ; there is little of the feeling 
which a common citizenship should bestow, little of that 
equality of man: and man which Christia'nity would seem to 
teach, and which our Indian Government has for some years 
favored. 

At Lucknow I saw the Residency, and at Cawnpore, on 
my return to the East Indian Railway, the intrenchments 
which were, each of them, the scene in 1857 of those de- 
fenses against the mutineers generally styled " glorious " or 
"heroic," though made by men fighting with ropes about 
their necks. The successful defenses of the fort at Arrah 
and of the Lucknow Residency were rather testimonies to 
the wonderful fighting powers of the English than to their 
courage — for cowards would fight when the alternative was, 
fight or die. As far as Oude was concerned, the " rebellion " 
of 1857 seems to have been rather a war than a mutiny; 
but the habits of the native princes would probably have 
led them to have acted as treacherously at Lucknow in the 
case of a surrender as did the Nana at Cawnpore, and our 
officers wisely determined that in no event would they treat 
for terms. What is to be regretted is that we as conquerors 
should have shown the Oude insurgents no more mercy than 
they would have shown to us, and that we should have 
made use of the pretext that the rising was a mere mutiny 
of our native troops as an excuse for hanging in cold blood 
the agriculturists of Oude. Whatever the duplicity of their 
rulers, whatever the provocation to annexation may have 
been, there can be no doubt that the revolution in the land- 
laws set on foot by us resulted in the offer of a career as na- 
tive policemen or railway ticket-clerks to men whose ances- 
tors were warriors and knights when ours wore woad ; and 
we are responsible before mankind for having treated as 
flagrant treason and mutiny a legitimate war on the part of 
the nobility of Oude. In the official papers of the Govern- 



430 Greater Britain. 

ment of the North-west Provinces the so-called " mutiny " is 
styled more properly " a grievous civil war." 

There is much reason to fear, not that the mutiny will be 
too long remembered, but that it will be too soon forgotten. 
Ten years ago Monghyr was an ash-heap, Cawnpore a name 
of horror, Delhi a stronghold of armed rebels, yet now we 
can travel without change of cars through peaceful and pros- 
perous Monghyr and Cawnpore — a thousand and twenty 
miles — ^in forty hours, and find at the end of our journey 
that shaded boulevards have already taken the place of the 
walls of Delhi. 

Quitting the main line of the East India Railway at Toon- 
dla Junction, I passed over a newly-made branch road to 
Agra. The line was but lately opened, and birds without 
number sat upon the telegraph-posts, and were seemingly 
too astonished to fly away from the train, while on the open 
barrens herds of Indian antelopes grazed fearlessly, and took 
no notice of us when we passed. 

Long before we entered Akbarabad, as the city should be 
called, by the great new bridge across the Jumna, I had 
sighted in the far distance the majestic, shining dome of 
the famed Taj Mahal; but when arrived within the city I 
first visited the citadel and ramparts. The fort and palace 
of Akbar are the Moslem creed in stone. Without — turned 
toward the unbeliever and the foe — the far-famed triple 
walls, frowning one above the other with the frown that a 
hill fanatic wears before he strikes the infidel ; within is the 
secure paradise of the believing " Emperor of the World " — 
delicious fountains pouring into basins of the whitest marble, 
beds of rose and myrtle, balconies and pavilions ; part of the 
zenana, or women's wing, overhanging the river, and com- 
manding the distant snow-dome of the Taj. Within, too, 
the " Motee Musjid " — " Pearl of Mosques " in fact as well as 
name — a marble-cloistered court, to which an angel architect 
could not add a stone, nor snatch one from it without spoil- 
ing all. These for believers ; for non-believers the grim old 
Saracenic "Hall of the Seat of Judgment." The palace, ex- 
cept the mosque, which is purity itself, is OA^erlaid with a 
crust of gems. There is one famed chamber — a woman's 
bath-house — the roof and sides of which are covered with 



Mohammedan Cities. 431 

tiny silver-mounted mirrors, placed at such angles as to re- 
flect to infinity the figures of those who stand within the 
bath ; and a court is near at hand, paved with marble squares 
in black and white, over which Akbar and his vizier used to 
sit and gravely play at draughts with dancing - girls for 
"pieces." 

On the river-bank, a mile from Akbar's palace, in the cen- 
tre of a vast garden entered through the noblest gateways 
in the world, stands the Taj Mahal, a terrace rising in daz- 
zling whiteness from a black mass of cypresses, and bearing 
four lofty, delicate minars, and the central pile that gleams 
like an Alp against the deep-blue sky — minars, terrace, tomb, 
all of spotless marble, and faultless shape. Its Persian build- 
ers named the Taj " the palace floating in the air." 

Out of the fierce heat and blazing sunlight you enter into 
chill and darkness, but soon begin to see the hollow dome 
growing into form above your head, and the tomb itself, that 
of Noor Mahal, the favorite queen of Shah Jehan, before you, 
and beside it her husband's humbler grave. Though within 
and without the Taj is white, still here you find the walls 
profusely jewelled, and the purity retained. Flowers are 
pictured on every block in mosaic of cinnamon-stone, carnel- 
ian, turquoise, amethyst, and emerald ; the corridors contain 
the whole Koran, inlaid in jet-black stone, yet the interior as 
a whole exceeds in chastity the spotlessness of the outer 
dome. Oriental, it is not barbaric, and a sweet melancholy 
is the effect the Taj produces on the mind when seen by 
day ; in the still moonlight the form is too mysterious to be 
touching. 

In a Persian manuscript there still remains a catalogue of 
the prices of the gems made use of in the building of the Taj, 
and of the places from which they came. Among those 
named are coral from Arabia, sapphires from Moldavia, ame- 
thysts from Persia, crystal from China, turquoises from Thi- 
bet, diamonds from Bundelcund, and lapis-lazuli from Ceylon. 
The stones were presents or tribute to the Emperor, and the 
master-masons came mostly from Constantinople and Bagdad 
— a fact which should be remembered when we are discuss- 
ing the intellectual capacity of the Bengal Hindoos. That a 
people who paint their cows pink with green spots, and their 



432 Greater Britain. 

horses orange or bright red, should be the authors of the 
Pearl Mosque and the Taj, would be too wonderful for our 
belief, but the Mohammedan conquerors brought with them 
the chosen artists of the Moslem world. The contrast be- 
tween the Taj and the Monkey Temple at Benares reminds 
one of that between a Cashmere and a Norwich shawl. 

It is not at Agra alone that we meet the works of Mogul 
Emperors. Much as we have ourselves done in building 
roads and bridges, there are many parts of Upper India where 
the traces of the Moslem are still more numerous than are at 
present those of the later conquerors of the unfortunate Hin- 
doos. Mosques, forts, conduits, bridges, gardens — all the 
works of the Moguls are both solid and magnificent, and it 
was with almost reverential feelings that I made my pilgrim- 
age to the tomb at Secundra of the great Emperor Akbar, 
grandfather of Shah Jehan, son of Hoomayoon, and founder 
of Agra city. 

It is to be remarked that the Mohammedans in India 
make a considerable show for their small numbers. Of the 
great cities of India the three Presidency towns are English ; 
and the three gigantic cities of Delhi, Agra, and Lucknow 
chiefly Mohammedan. Benares alone is a Hindoo city, and 
even in Benares the Mohammedans have their temples. All 
the great buildings of India are Mohammedan ; so are all the 
great works that are not English. Yet even in the Agra tlis- 
trict the Mohammedans are only one-twelfth of the popula- 
tion, but they live chiefly in the towns.- 

The history of the Mogul Empire of India from the time of 
the conquest of the older empire by Tamerlane in the four- 
teenth century, and the forced conversion to Mohammedan- 
ism of a vast number of Hindoos, and that of Akbar's splendor 
and enormous power down to the transportation of the last 
Emperor in 1857 to Rangoon, and the shooting of his sons in a 
dry ditch by Captain Hodson, is one for us to ponder care- 
fully. Those who know what we have done in India say that 
even in our codes — and they are allowed to be our best claim 
to the world's applause — we fall short of Akbar's standard. 

Delhi, the work of Shah Jehan, founder of the Taj and the 
Pearl Mosque, was built by himself in a wilderness, as was 
Agra by the Emperor Akbar. We who have seen the time 



Simla. 433 

that has fiassed since its foundation by Washington before 
the capital of the United States has grown out of the village 
shape, can not deny that the Mogul emperors, if they were 
despots, were at least tyrants possessed of imperial energy. 
Akbar built Agra twenty or thirty miles from Futtehpore 
Sikri, his former capital, but Jehan had the harder task of 
forcing his people to quit an earlier site not five miles from 
modern Delhi, while Akbar merely moved his palace, and let 
the people follow. 

Delhi suffered so much at our hands during the storm- in 
1857, and has suffered so much since in the way of Napole- 
onic boulevards, intended to prevent the necessity of storm- 
ing it again, that it must be much changed from what it was 
before the war. The walls which surround the whole city 
are nearly as grand as those of the fort at Agra, and the gate 
towers are very Gibraltars of brick and stone, as we found 
to our cost when we battered the Cashmere Gate in 1857. 
The palace and the Motee Musjid are extremely fine, but in- 
ferior to their namesakes at Agra ; and the Jumna Musjid — 
reputed the most beautiful as it is the largest mosque in the 
world — impressed me only by its size. The view, however, 
from its minars is one of the whole IN'orth-west. The vast 
city becomes an ant-heap, and you instinctively peer out into 
space, and try to discern the sea toward Calcutta or Bom- 
bay. 

The historical memories that attach to Delhi differ from 
those that we associate with the name of Agra. There is 
little pleasure in the contemplation of the zenana, where the 
miserable old man, the last of the Moguls, dawdled away his 
years. 



CHAPTER yn. 

SIMLA. 

After visiting Nicholson's tomb at the Cashmere Gate 
I entered my one-horse dawk — the regulation carriage of 
India — and set off for Kurnaul and Simla, passing between 
the sand-hills, gravel-pits, and ruined mosques through which 
the rebel cavalry made their famous sortie upon our camp. 

T 



434: Greater Britain. 

It was evening wlien we started, and as the dawk-giiarrees are 
so arranged that you can lie with comfort at full length, but 
can not sit without misery, I brought my canvas bag into 
service as a pillow, and was soon asleep. 

When I Avoke we had stopped ; and when I drew the slid- 
ing shutter that does duty for door and window, and peered 
out into the darkness, I discovered that there was no horse 
in the shafts, and that my driver and his horse syce — or 
groom — were smoking their hubble-bubbles at a well in the 
company of a passing friend. By making free use of the 
strongest language that my dictionary contained I prevailed 
u23on the men to put in a fresh horse, but starting was a dif- 
ferent matter. The horse refused to budge an inch, except 
indeed, backward, or sidewise toward the ditch. Six grooms 
came running from the stable, and placed themselves one at 
each wheel, and one on each side of the borse, while many 
boys pushed behind. At a signal from the driver, the four 
wheel-men threw their whole weight on the spokes, and one 
of the men at the horse's head held up the obstinate brute's 
off fore-leg, so that he was fairly run off the ground, and 
forced to make a start, which he did with a violent plunge, 
for which all the grooms were, however, well prepared. As 
they yelled with triumph we dashed along for some twenty 
yards, then swerved sidewise, and came to a dead stop. 
Again and again the starting process was repeated, till at 
last the horse went off at a gallop, which carried us to the 
end of the stage. This is the only form of starting known to 
up-country horses, as I soon found ; but sometimes even this 
ceremony fails to start the horse, and twice in the Delhi-to- 
Kalka journe)' we lost a quarter of an hour over horses, and 
had finally to get others from the stable. 

About midnight we reached a Government bungalow, or 
road-side inn, where I was to sup, and five minutes produced 
a chicken curry which, in spite of its hardness, was disposed 
of in as many more. Meanwhile a storm had come rumbling 
and roaring across the skies, and when I went to the door to 
start, the bungalow-butler and cook pointed to the gharree, 
and told me that driver and horse were gone. Not wishing 
the bungalow-men to discover how small was my stock of 
Hindostanee, I paid careful attention to their conversation, 



Simla. 435 

and looked up each time that I heard " sahib," as I knew 
that then they must be talking about me. Seeing this, they 
seemed to agree that I was a thorough Hindostanee scholar, 
but too proud to answer when they spoke. While they 
were humbly requesting that I would bow to the storm and 
sleep in the bungalow, which was filled with twittering spar- 
rows, waked by the thunder or the lights, I was reading my 
dictionary by the faint glimmer of the cocoa-nut oil-lamp, and 
trying to find out how I was to declare that I insisted on 
going on at once. When at last I hit upon my phrase the 
storm was over, and the butler soon found both horse and 
driver. After this adventure my Hindostanee improved fast. 

A remarkable misapprehension prevails in England con- 
cerning the languages of India. The natives of India, we 
are inclined to believe, speak Hindostanee, which is the lan- 
guage of India as English is that of Britain. The truth is, 
that there are in India a multitude of languages, of which 
Hindostanee is not even one. Besides the great tongues, 
Urdu, Maratti, and Tamil, there are dozens, if not hundreds- 
of local languages, and innumerable dialects of each. Hindo- 
st^ee is a camp language, which contains many native 
words, but which also is largely composed of imported Ara- 
bic and Persian words, and which is not without specimens 
of English and Portuguese. " Saboon," for soap, is the lat- 
ter ; " glassie," for a tumbler, and " istubul," for a stable, the 
former ; but almost every common English phrase and En- 
glish word of command forms in a certain measure part of 
the Hindostanee tongue. Some terms have been ingeniously 
perverted ; for instance, " Who comes there ?" has become 
" Hookum dar ?" " Stand at ease 1" is changed to " Tundel 
tis !" and " Present arms !" to " Furyunt ram !" The Hindo- ■ 
stance name for a European lady is " mem sahib," a feminine 
formed from " sahib " — lord, or European — by prefixing to it 
the English servants' " mum," or corruption of " madam." " 
Some pure Hindostanee words have a comical sound enough to 
English ears, as " hookm," an order, pronounced "hook'em;" 
" misri," sugar, which sounds like " misery ;" " top," fever ; 
" molly," a gardener ; and " dolly," a bundle of vegetables. 

Dawk travelling in the Punjaub is by no means unpleas- 
ant ; by night you sleep soundly, and by day there is no lack 



436 Greater Britain. 

of life in the mere traffic on the road, while the general scene 
is full of charm. Here and there are serais^ or corrals, built 
by the Mogul emperors or by the British Government for 
the use of native travellers. Our word " caravansary " is 
properly " caravan-serai," an inclosure for the use of those 
travelling in caravans. The keeper of the serai supplies wa- 
ter, provender, and food, and at night the serais along the 
road glow with the cooking fires- and resound with the voices 
of thousands of natives, who when on journeys never seem to 
sleep. Throughout the plains of India the high-roads pass 
villages, serais, police stations, and groups of trees at almost 
equal intervals. The space between clump and clump is gen- 
erally about three miles, and in this difstance you never see a 
house, so compact are the Indian villages. The North-west 
Provinces are the most densely - peopled countries of the 
world, yet between village and village you often see no trace 
of man, while jackals and wild blue-cows roam about as free- 
ly as though the country were an untrodden wilderness. 

Each time you reach a clump of banyans, tamarind and 
tulip trees, you find the same tenants of its shades : village 
police station. Government posting-stable, and serai ar^al- 
ways inclosed within its limits. All the villages are forti- 
fied with lofty walls of mud or brick, as are the numerous po- 
lice stations along the road, where the military constabulary, 
in their dark-blue tunics, yellow trowsers, and huge puggrees 
of bright red, rise up from sleep or hookah as you pass, and, 
turning out with tulwars and rifles, perform the military sa- 
lute — due in India to the white face from all native troops. 
Your skin here is your patent of aristocracy and your pass- 
port, all in one. 

It is not only by the police and troops that you are sa- 
luted: the natives all salaam to you — except mere coolies, 
who do not think themselves worthy even to offer a salute — 
and many Anglo-Indians refuse to return their bow. Every 
Englishman in India ought to act as though he were an em- 
bassador of the queen and people, and regulate accordingly 
his conduct in the most trifling things ; but too often the low 
bow and humble " salaam sahib " is not acknowledged even 
by a curt " salaam." 

In the drier portions of the country women were busy 



Simla. 437 

with knives digging up little roots of grass for horse-food ; 
and four or five times a day a great bugling would be heard 
and answered by my driver, while the mail-cart shot by us 
at full speed. The astonishment with which I looked upon 
the Indian plains grew even stronger as I advanced up coun- 
try. Not only is bush scarce, and forest never seen, but 
where there is jungle it is of the thinnest and least tropical 
kind. It would be harder to traverse, on horse or foot, the 
thinnest coppice in the south of England than the densest jun- 
gle in the plain country of all India. 

Both in the villages and in the desert portions of the road 
the ground-squirrels galloped in troops before the dawk, and 
birds without number hopped fearlessly beside us as we pass- 
ed ; hoopoes, blue-jays, and minas were the commonest, but 
there were many paddy-birds and graceful golden egrets in 
the lower grounds. 

Between Delhi and Kurnaul were many ruins, now green 
with the pomegranate leaf, now scarlet with the bloom of 
the peacock-tree, and about the ancient villages acre after 
acre of plantain-garden, irrigated by the conduits of the Mo- 
ha^imedan conquerors ; at last Kurnaul itself — a fortified 
town — seen through a forest of date, wild mango, and banyan, 
with patches of wheat about it, and strings of laden camels 
winding along the dusty road. After a bheestie had poured 
a skinful of water over me I set off again for Kalka, halting 
in the territory of the Puttiala Rajah to see his gardens at 
Pinjore, and then passed on toward the base of the Hima- 
layan foot-hills. The wheat harvest was in progress in the 
Kalka country, and the girls, reaping with the sickle, and 
carrying away the sheaves upon their heads, bore themselves 
gracefully, as Hindoo women ever do, and formed a contrast 
to the coarse old land-owners as these rode past, each follow- 
ed by his pipe-bearer and his retinue. 

A Ooorkha battalion and a Thibetan goat-train had just 
entered Kalka when I reached it, and the confusion was such 
that I started at once in a jampan up the sides of the brown 
and desolate hills. A jampan, called tonjon in Madras, is an 
arm-chair in shafts, and built more lightly than a sedan ; it 
is carried at a short trot by four men, while another four, and 
a mate or chief, make their way up the hills before you, and 



438 Greater Britain. 

meet you here and there to relieve guard. The hire of the 
jampan and nine men is less than that of a pony and groom 
— a curious illustration of the cheapness of labor in the East. 
When you first reach India this cheapness is a standing won- 
der. At your hotel at Calcutta you are asked, " You wish 
boy pull punkah all night ? Boy pull punkah all day and all 
night for two annas " (dd.). On some parts of the railway 
lines, where there is also a good road, the natives find it 
cheaper to travel by palankeen than to ride in a third-class 
railway carriage. It is cheaper in Calcutta to be carried by 
four men in a palki than to ride in a " second-class gharry," 
or very bad cab ; and the streets of the city are invariably 
watered by hand by bheesties with skins. The key to In- 
dian politics Mes in these facts. 

At Wilson's at Calcutta the rule of the hotel obliges one 
to hire a kitmutghar, who waits at table. This I did for the 
magnificent wage of lie?, a day, out of which Cherry — the 
nearest phonetic spelling of my man's name — of course fed 
and kept himself. I will do him the justice to add that he 
managed to make about another shilling a day out of me, 
and that he always brought me small change in copper, on 
the chance that I should give it him. Small as seemed these 
wages, I could have hired him for one-fifth the rate that I 
have named had I been ready to retain him iu my service for 
a month or two. Wages in India are somewhat raised by 
the practice of dustooree — a custom by which every native, 
high or low, takes toll of all money that passes through his 
hands. My first introduction to this institution struck me 
forcibly, though afterward I came to look upon it as tranquil- 
ly as old Indians do. It was in the gardens of the Taj, where, 
to relieve myself from importunity, I had bought a photo- 
graph of the dome : a native servant of the hotel, who ac- 
companied me much against my will, and who, being far 
more ignorant of English than I was of Hindostanee, was of 
absolutely no use, I had at last succeeded in warning off 
from my side, but directly I bought the photograph for half 
a rupee he rushed upon the seller, and claimed one-fourth of 
the price, or two annas, as his share, I having transgressed 
his privilege in buying directly instead of through him as in- 
termediary. I remonstrated, but to my amazement the sell- 



Simla. 439 

er paid the money quietly, and evidently looked on me as a 
meddling sort of fellow enough for interfering with the insti- 
tution of dustooree. Customs, after all, are much the same 
throughout the world. Our sportsmen follow the habit of 
Confucius, whose disciples two or three thousand years ago 
proclaimed that ^' he angled, but did not use a net ; he shot, 
but not at birds perching ;" our servants, perhaps, are not 
altogether innocent of dustoree. However much wages may 
be supplemented by dustooree, they are low enough to allow 
of the keeping of a tribe of servants by persons of moderate 
incomes. A small family at Simla " require " three body- 
servants, two cooks, one butler, two grooms, two gardeners, 
two messengers, two nurses, two washermen, two water-car- 
riers, thirteen jampan-men, one sweeper, one lamp-cleaner, and 
one boy, besides the European lady's maid, or thirty-five in 
all ; but if wages were doubled perhaps fewer men would be 
" absolutely needed." At the house where I staid at Simla 
ten jampan-men and two gardeners were supposed to be con- 
tinuously employed in a tiny flower-garden round the house. 
To a European fresh from the temperate climates there is 
something irksome in the restraint produced by the constant 
presence of servants in every corner of an Indian house. To 
pull off one's own socks or pour out the water into the basin 
for one's self becomes a much-longed-for luxury. It is far 
from pleasant to have three or four natives squatting in front 
of your door, with nothing to do unless you find such odd 
jobs for them as holding the heel of your boot while you 
pull it on, or brushing your clothes for the fourteenth time. 

The greater or less value of the smallest coin in common 
use in a country is a rough test of the wealth or poverty of 
its inhabitants, and by the application of it to India we find 
that country poor indeed. At Agra I had gone to a money- 
changer in the bazar, and asked him for change, in the cow- 
rie-shells which do duty as money, for an anna, or l^d. piece. 
He gave me handful after handful, till I cried enough. Yet 
when in the afternoon of the same day I had a performance 
on my threshold of " Tasa-ba-tasa " — that singular tune which 
reigns from Java to the Bosphorus, with Sanscrit words in 
Persia, and Malay words in the Eastern islands — the three 
players seemed grateful for half a dozen of the cowries, for 



440 Greater Britain. 

they treated me to a native version of " Vee vont gah ham 
tall marclid, vee vont gah ham tall madid," by way of thanks. 
Many strange natural objects pass as uncoined money in the 
East : tusks in Africa,women in Arabia, human skulls in Bor- 
neo ; the Red Indians of America sell their neighbors' scalps 
for money, but have not yet reached the height of civiliza- 
tion whick would be denoted by their keeping them to use 
as such ; cowrie-shells, however, passed as money in almost 
every ancient trading-country of the world. 

The historical cheapness of lab'or in India has led to such 
an obstinate aversion to all labor-saving expedients that such 
great works as the making of railway embankments and the 
boulevard construction at Delhi are conducted by the scrap- 
ing together of earth with the hands, and the collected pile 
is slowly placed in tiny baskets, much like strawberry pottles, 
and borne away on women's heads to its new destination. 
Wheel-barrows, water-carts, picks, and shovels are in India all 
unknown. 

If on my road from Kalka to Simla I had an example of 
the cheapness of Indian labor, I also had one of its efficiency. 
The coolie who carried my baggage on his head trotted up 
the hills for twenty-one hours, without halting for more than 
an hour or two, and this for two days' pay. 

During the first half hour after leaving Kalka the heat 
was as great as on the plains, but we had not gone many 
miles before we came out of the heat and dust into a new 
world, and an atmosphere every breath of which was life. I 
got out, and walked for miles ; and when we halted at a rest- 
house on the first plateau I thoroughly enjoyed a cup of the 
mountain tea, and was still more pleased at the sight of the 
first red-coated English soldiers that I had seen since I left 
Niagara. The men were even attempting bowls and cricket, 
so cool were the evenings at this station. There is grim sat- 
ire in the fact that the director-general of military gymnas- 
tics has his establishment at Simla, in the cold of the snowy 
range, and there invents running drills and such like summer 
diversions, to be executed by the unfortunates in the plains 
below. Bowls, which are an amusement at Kussoolie, would 
in the hot weather be death at Kalka, only ten miles away ; 
but so short is the memory of climate that you are no more 



Simla. 441 

able to conceive the heat of the plains when in the hills than 
the cold of the hills when at Calcutta. 

There is no reason except a slight and temporary increase 
of cost to prevent the whole of the European troops in India 
being concentrated in a few cool and healthy stations. Pro- 
vided that all the artillery be retained in the hands of the 
Europeans, almost the whole of the Englisfi forces might be 
kept in half a dozen hill stations, of which Darjeeling and 
Bangalore would be two, and some place near Bombay a 
third. It has been said that the men would be incapable, 
through want of acclimatization, of acting on the plains if re- 
tained in hill stations except when their services were need- 
ed ; but it is notoriously the fact that new-comers from En- 
gland — that is, men with health — do not sujQTer seriously from 
heat during the first six months which they pass upon the 
plains. 

Soon after dark a terrific thunder-storm came on, the thun- 
der rolling round the valleys and along the ridges, while the 
rain fell in short, sharp showers. My men put me down on 
the lee-side of a hut, and squatted for a long smoke. The 
custom common to all the Eastern races of sitting round a 
fire smoking all night long explains the number and the ex- 
cellence of their tales and legends. In Europe we see the 
Swedish peasants sitting round their hearths chatting during 
the long winter evenings : hence follow naturally the Thor 
legends ; our sailors are with us the only men given to sit- 
ting in groups to talk: they are noted story-tellers. The 
word " yarn " exemplifies the whole philosophy of the mat- 
ter. We meet, however, here the eternal difficulty of which 
is cause and which is effect. It is easy to say that the long 
nights of Xorway, the confined space of the ship, making the 
fo'castle the sailor's only lounge, each in their way necessitate 
the story-telling ; not so in India, not so in Egypt, in Arabia, 
in Persia : there can here be no necessity for men sitting up 
all night to talk short of pure love of talk for talking's sake. 

When the light came in the morning we were ascending 
the same strangely-ribbed hills that we had been crossing 
by torchlight during the night, and were meeting Chinese- 
faced Thibetans, with hair done into many pigtails, who 
were laboriously bringing over the mountain-passes Chinese 

T2 



442 Greater Britain. 

goods in tiny sheep-loads. For miles I journeyed on, up 
mountain-sides and down into ravines, but never for a single 
moment upon a level, catching sight sometimes of portions 
of the Snowy Range itself, far distant, and half mingled with 
the clouds, till at last a huge mountain mass rising to the 
north and east blocked out all view save that behind me 
over the sea of hills that I had crossed, and the scene became 
monotonously hideous, with only that grandeur which huge- 
ness carries with it — a view, in short, that would be fine at 
sunset, and at no other time. The weather, too, grew damp 
and cold — a cruel cold, with driving rain — and the landscape 
was dreariness itself. 

Suddenly we crossed the ridge, and began to descend, 
when the sky cleared, and I found myself on the edge of the 
rhododendron forest — tall trees with dark:sgreen leaves and 
masses of crimson flowers ; ferns of a hundred different kinds 
marking the beds of the rivulets that coursed down through 
the woods, which were filled with troops of chattering monk- 
eys. _ ^ 

Rising again slightly, I began to pass the European bun- 
galows, each in its thicket of deodar, and few with flat 
ground enough for more than half a rose-bed, or a quarter 
of a croquet-ground. On either side the ridge was a deep 
valley, with terraced rice-fields five thousand feet below, and, 
in the distance, on the one side the mist-covered plains lit by 
the single silvery ribbon of the distant Sutlej, on the other 
side the Snowy Range. 

The first Europeans whom I met in Simla were the vice- 
roy's children and their nurses, who formed with their escort 
a stately procession. First came a tall native in scarlet, 
then a jampan with a child, then one with a nurse aiid vice- 
regal baby, and so on, the bearers wearing scarlet and gray. 
All the residents at Simla have different uniforms for their 
jampanees, some clothing their men in red and green, some 
in purple and yellow, some in black and white. Before reach- 
ing the centre of the town I had met several Europeans rid- 
ing, although the sun was still high and hot, but before even- 
ing a hailstorm came across the range and filled the woods 
with a chilling mist, and night found me toasting my feet at 
a blazing fire in an Alpine room of polished pine — a real room. 



Simla. 443 

with doors and casement ; not a section of a street with a bed 
in it, as are the rooms in the Indian plains. Two blankets 
were a luxury in this " tropical climate of Simla," as one of 
our best-informed London newspapers once called it. The 
fact is that Simla, which stands at from seven to eight thou- 
sand feet above the sea, and in latitude 31°, or 7° north of the 
boundary of the tropics, has a climate cold in every thing 
except its sun, which is sometimes strong. The snow lies on 
the ground at intervals for five months of the year ; and dur- 
ing what is by courtesy styled " the hot weather " cold rains 
are of frequent occurrence. 

The climate of Simla is no mere matter of curiosity : it is 
a question of serious interest in connection with the retention 
of our Indian empire. When the Government seeks refuge 
here from the Calcutta heat the various departments are lo- 
cated in tiny cottages and bungalows up on the mountain 
and down in the valley, practically as far from each other as 
London from Brighton ; and, moreover, Simla itself is forty 
miles from Kalka by the shortest path, and sixty by the bet- 
ter bridle-path. There is clearly much loss of time in sending 
dispatches for half the year to and from a place like this, and 
there is no chance of the railway ever coming nearer to it 
than Kalka, even if it reaches that. On the other hand, the 
telegraph is replacing the railway day by day, and mount- 
ain heights are no bar to wires. This poor little, uneven 
hill village has been styled the " Indian Capua " and nick- 
named the " Hill Versailles ;" but so far from enervating the 
ministers or enfeebling the administration, Simla gives vigor 
to the Government, and a hearty English tone to the State 
papers issued in the hot months. English ministers are not 
in London all the year long, and no men, ministers or not, 
could stand four years' continual brain- work in Calcutta. In 
1866, the first year of the removal of the Government as a 
whole and publication of the Gazette at Simla during the sum- 
mer, all the arrears of work in all the offices were cleared off 
for the first tune since the occupation by us of any part of 
India. 

Bengal, the ]N'orth-west Provinces, and the Punjaub must 
soon be made into " governorships," instead of " lieutenant- 
governorships," so that the viceroy may be relieved from 



444 Greater Britain. 

tedious work, and time saved by the ^N'orthern governors re- 
porting straight home, as do the Governors of Madras and 
Bombay, unless a system be adopted under which all shall 
report to the viceroy. At all events, the five divisions must 
be put upon the same footing one with another. This being 
granted, there is no conceivable reason for keeping the vice- 
roy at Calcutta — a city singularly hot, unhealthy, and out of 
the way. On our Council of India sitting at the capital, we 
ought to have natives picked from all India for their honesty, 
ability, and discretion ; but so bad is the water at Calcutta 
that the city is deadly to water-drinkers ; and although they 
value the distinction of a seat at the Council more than any 
other honor within their reach, many of the most distinguish- 
ed natives in India have chosen to resign their j)laces rather 
than pass a second season at Calcutta. 

It is not necessary that we should argue about Calcutta's 
disadvantages. It is enough to say that, of all Indian cities, 
we have selected for our capital the most distant and the 
most unhealthy. The great question is. Shall we have one 
capital or two? Shall we keep the viceroy all the year 
round in a central but hot position, such as Delhi, Agra, Al- 
lahabad, or Jubbelpore, or else at a less central but cooler sta- 
tion, such as !N"assuck, Poonah, Bangalore, or Mussoorie ? or 
shall we keep him at a central place during the cool, and a 
hill place during the hot weather ? There can be but little 
doubt that Simla is a necessity at present, but with a fairly 
healthy city, such as Agra, for the head-quarters of the Gov- 
ernment, and the railway open to within a few miles of Mus- 
soorie, so that men could run to the hills in six or seven hours, 
and even spend a few days there in each summer month, an 
efficient government could be maintained in the plains. "We 
must remember that Agra is now within twenty-three days 
of London ; and that, with the Persian Gulf route open, and 
a railway from Kurrachee (the natural port of England in 
India), leave for home would be a matter still more simple 
than it has become already. With some such central town 
as Poonah for the capital, the Bombay and Madras command- 
er-in-chiefships could be abolished, with the result of saving a 
considerable expense and greatly increasing the efficiency of 
the Indian army. It is probable that Simla will not continue 



Colonization. 445 

to be the chosen station of the Government in the hills. The 
town is subject to the ravages of dysentery ; the cost of 
draining it would be immense, and the water supply is very 
limited : the bheesties have often to wait whole hours for their 
turn. 

Mussoorie has all the advantages and none of the draw- 
backs of Simla, and lies compactly in ground on which a 
small city could be built, whereas Simla straggles along a 
narrow mountain ridge, and up and down the steep sides of 
an Alpine peak. It -is questionable, however, whether, if In- 
dia is to be governed from at home, the seat of Government 
should not be at Poonah, within reach of London. The tele- 
graph has already made viceroys of the ancient kind impos- 
sible. 

The sunrise view of the Snowy Range from my bungalow 
was one rather strange from the multitude of peaks m sight 
at once than either beautiful or grand. The desolate ranges 
of foot-hills destroy the beauty that the contrast of the deo- 
dars, the crimson rhododendrons, and the snow would other- 
wise produce, and the height at which you stand seems to 
dwarf the distant ranges ; but from one of the spots which I 
reached in a mountain march the prospect was widely diifer- 
ent. Here we saw at once the sources of the Jumna, the 
Sutlej, and the Ganges, the dazzling peaks of Gungootrie, of 
Jumnotrie, and of Kamet; while behind us in the distant 
plains we could trace the Sutlej itself, silvered by the hazy 
rays of the half-risen sun. We had in sight not only the 
26,000 feet of Kamet, but no less than twenty other peaks 
of over 20,000 feet, snow-clad to their very basis, while be- 
tween us and the nearest outlying range were valleys from 
which the ear caught the humble murmur of fresh-risen 
streams. 



CHAPTER Vm 

COLONIZATION. 



Connected with the question of the site of the future cap- 
ital is that of the possibility of the colonization by English- 
men of portions of the Peninsula of India. 

Hitherto the attempts at settlement which have been made 



446 Greater Britain. 

have been mainly confined to six districts — Mysore, where 
there are only some dozen planters ; the Neilgherries proper, 
where cofiee-planting is largely carried on; Oude, where 
many Europeans have taken land as zemindars, and cultivate 
a portion of it, while they let out the remainder to natives on 
the Metayer plan ; Bengal, where indigo-planting is gaining 
ground ; the Himalayan valleys, and Assam. Settlement in 
the hot plains is limited by the fact that English children 
can not there be reared, so to the hill districts the discussion 
must be confined. 

One of the commonest of mistakes respecting India con- 
sists in the supposition that there is available land in large 
quantities on the slopes of the Himalayas. There are no Him- 
alayan slopes ; the country is all straight up and down, and 
for English colonists there is no room — ^no ground that will 
grow any thing but deodars, and those only moderately well. 
The hot sun dries the ground, and the violent rains follow, 
and cut it through and through with deep channels, in this 
wav gradually making all the hills both steep and ribbed. 
Mysore is still a native State, but, in spite of this, European 
settlement is increasing year by year, and there, as in the 
Neilgherries proper, there is room for many cofiee-planters, 
though fever is not unknown ; but when India is carefully 
surveyed the only district that appears to be thoroughly 
suited to English settlement, as contrasted with mere plant- 
ing or land-holding, is the valley of Cashmere, where the 
race would probably not sufler deterioration. With the ex- 
cej)tion of Cashmere, none of the deep mountain valleys are 
cool enough for permanent European settlement. Family 
life is impossible where there is no home ; you can have no 
English comfort, no English virtues, in a climate which 
forces your people to live out of doors, or else in rocking- 
chairs or hammocks. Night-work and reading are all but 
impossible in a climate where multitudes of insects haunt 
the air. In the Himalayan valleys the hot weather is terri- 
bly scorching, and it lasts for half the year, and on the hill- 
sides there is but little fertile soil. 

The civilians and rulers of India in general are extremely 
jealous of the " interlopers," as European settlers are term- 
ed ; and although tea cultivation was at first encouraged by 



Colonization. 447 

the Bengal Government, recent legislation, fair or unfair, has 
almost ruined the tea-planters of Assam. The native pop- 
ulation of that district is averse to labor, and coolies from 
a distance have to be brought in ; but the Government of 
India, as the planters say, interferes with harsh and narrow 
regulations, and so enormously increases the cost of imported 
labor as to ruin the planters, who, even when they have got 
their laborers on the ground, can not make them work, as 
there exist no means of compelling specific performance of a 
contract to work. The remedy known to the English law is 
an action for damages brought by the employer against the 
laborer, so with English obstinacy we declare that an action 
for damages shall be the remedy in Burmah or Assam. A 
provision for attachment of goods and imprisonment of per- 
son of laborers refusing to perform their portion of a contract 
to work was inscribed in the draft of the proposed Indian 
" Code of Civil Procedure," but vetoed by the authorities at 
horfie. 

The Spanish Jesuits themselves were not more afraid of 
free white settlers than is our Bengal Government. An en- 
terprising merchant of Calcutta lately obtained a grant of 
vast tracts of country in the Sunderbunds — the fever-haunted 
jungle near Calcutta — and had already completed his ar- 
rangements for importing Chinese laborers to cultivate his 
acquisitions, when the jealous civilians got wind of the affair, 
and forced Government into a most undignified retreat from 
their agreement. 

The secret of this opposition to settlement by Europeans 
lies partly in a horror of " low-caste Englishmen," and a fear 
that they will somewhat debase Europeans in native eyes, 
but far more in the wish of the old civilians to keep India to 
themselves as a sort of " happy hunting-ground " — a wish 
which has prompted them to start the cry of " India for the 
Indians " — which of course means India for the Anglo-In- 
dians. 

Somewhat apart from the question of European coloniza- 
tion, but closely related to it, is that of the holding by Eu- 
ropeans of landed estates in India. It will perhaps be con- 
ceded that the European should, on the one hand, be allowed 
to come into the market and purchase land, or rent it from the 



4:4:8 Greater Britain. 

Government or from individuals, on the sarne conditions as 
those which would apply to natives, and, on the other hand, 
that special grants should not be made to Europeans as they 
were by us in Java in old times. In Eastern countries, how- 
ever. Government can hardly be wholly neutral, and, what- 
ever the law, if European land-holders be encouraged, they 
will come ; if discouraged, they will stop away. From India 
they stop away, while such as do reach Hindostan are known 
in official circles by the significant name of " interlopers." 

Under a healthy social system, which the presence of En- 
glish planters throughout India, and the support which 
would thus be given to* the unofficial press would of itself do 
much to create, the owning of land by Europeans could pro- 
duce nothing but good. The danger of the use of compul- 
sion toward the natives would not exist, because in India — 
unlike what is the case in Dutch Java — the interest of the 
ruling classes would be the other way. If it be answered 
that, once in possession of the land, the Europeans would get 
the government into their own hands, we must reply that 
they could never be sufficiently numerous to have the slight- 
est chance of doing any thing of the kind. As we have seen 
in Ceylon, the attempt on the part of the planters to usurp 
the government is sternly repressed by the English people 
the moment that its true bearing is understood; and yet 
in Ceylon the planters are far more numerous in proportion 
to the population than they can ever be in India, where the 
climate of the plains is fatal to European children, and where 
there is comparatively little land upon the hills ; while in 
Ceylon the coffee-tracts, which are mountainous and healthy, 
form a sensible proportion of the whole lands of the island. 
It is true that the press, when once completely in the plant- 
ers' hands, may advocate their interests at the expense of 
those of the natives, but in the case of Queensland we have 
seen that this is no protection to the planters against the in- 
quisitive home eye, which would be drawn to India as it has 
been to Queensland by the reports of independent travellers, 
and of interested but honest missionaries. 

The infamies of the foundation of the indigo-plantations 
in Bengal, and of many of the tea-plantations in Assam, in 
which violence was freely used to make the natives grow the 



Colonization. *449 

selected crop, and in some cases the land actually stolen 
from its owners, have gone far to make European settlement 
in India a by-word among the friends of the Hindoo, but it is 
clear that an efficient police would suffice to restrain these 
illegalities and hideous wrongs. It might become advisable 
in the interest of the natives to provide that not only the 
officers, but also the sub-officers and some constables of the 
police, should be Europeans in districts where the plantations 
lay, great care being taken to select honest and fearless men, 
and to keep a strict watch on their conduct. 

The two great securities against that further degradation 
of the natives which has been foretold as a result of the ex- 
pected influx of Europeans are the general teaching of the 
English language, and the grant of perfect freedom of action 
(the Government standmg aloof) to missionaries of every 
creed under heaven. The bestowal of the English tongue 
upon the natives will give the local newspapers a larger cir- 
culation among them than among the planter-classes, and so, 
by the powerful motive of self-interest, force them to the side 
of liberty ; while the honesty of some of the missionaries and 
the interest of others will certainly place the majority of the 
religious bodies on the side of freedom. It is needless to say 
that the success of a policy which would be opposed by the 
local press and at the same time by the chief English Church- 
es is not an eventuality about Avhich we need give ourselves 
concern, and it is therefore probable that on the whole the 
encouragement of European settlement upon the plains would 
be conducive to the welfare of the native race. 

That settlement or colonization would make our tenure of 
India more secure is very doubtful, and, if certain, would be 
a point of little moment. If, when India has passed through 
the present transition stage from a country of many peoples 
to a country of only one, we can not continue to rule her by 
the consent of the majority of her inhabitants, or occupation 
of the country must come to an end, whether we will or no. 
At the same time, the union of interests and community of 
ideas which would rise out of well-ordered settlement would 
do much to endear our Government to the great body of the 
natives. As a warning against European settlement as it is, 
every Englishman should read the drama " Nil Darpan." 



45Q* Greater Britain. 

During my stay at Simla I visited a pretty fair in one of 
the neighboring valleys. There was much buffoonery and 
dancing — among other things, a sort of jig by a fakeer, who 
danced himself into a fit, real or pretended ; but the charm 
of this, as of all Hindoo gatherings, lay in the color. The 
women of the Punjaub dress very gayly for their fetes, wear- 
ing tight-fitting trowsers of crimson, blue, or yellow, and a 
long thin robe of white, or crimson-grounded Cashmere shawl ; 
bracelets and anklets of silver, and a nose-ring, either huge 
and thin, or small and nearly solids — complete the dress. 

At the fair were many of the Goorkhas (ol whom there is 
a regiment at Simla), who danced, and seemingly enjoyed 
themselves immensely ; indeed, the natives of all parts of In- 
dia, from IsTepaul to the Deccan, possess a most enviable fac- 
ulty of amusement, a'nd they say that there is a professional 
buffoon attached to every Goorkha regiment. Their full- 
dress is like that of the Yrench. chassetirs dpied, but in their un- 
dress uniform of white, the trowsers worn so tight as to wrin- 
kle from stretching — these dashmg little fellows, with their 
thin legs, broad shoulders, bullet heads, and flat laces, look ex- 
tremely like a corps of jockeys. A general inspecting one 
of these regiments once said to the colonel, " Your men are 
small, sir." " Their pay is small, sir !" growled the colonel, 
in a towering passion. 

There were unmistakable traces of Buddhist architecture 
in the little valley Hindoo shrine. Of the Chinese pilgrim- 
ages to India in the Buddhist period there are many records 
yet extant, and one of these, we are told, relates how, as late 
as the fourteenth century, the Emperor of China asked leave 
of the Delhi ruler to rebuild a temple at the southern base 
of the Himalayas, inasmuch as it was visited by his Tartar 
people. 



The Gazette. 451 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE "gazette." 

Op all printed information uj)on India, there is none which, 
either for value or interest, can be ranked with that contained 
in the Government Gazette, which during my stay at Simla 
was published at that town, the Viceroy's Council having 
moved there for the hot weather. Not only are the records 
of the mere routine business interesting from their variety, 
but almost every week there is printed along with the Gazette 
a supplement, which contains memoranda from leading na- 
tives or from the representatives of the local governments 
upon the operations of certain customs, or on the probable 
effects of a proposed law, or similar communications. Some- 
times the circulars issued by the Government are alone re- 
printed, " with a view to elicit opinions," but more generally 
the whole of the replies are given. 

It is difficult for English readers to conceive the number 
and variety of subjects upon which a single number of the 
Gazette will give information of some kind. The paragraphs 
are strung together in the order in which they are received, 
without arrangement or connection. "A copy of a treaty 
with his Highness the Maharajah of Cashmere" stands side 
by side with a grant of three months' leave to a lieutenanteof 
Bombay ^Native Foot ; while above is an account of the sup- 
pression of the late murderous outrages in the Punjaub, and 
below a narrative of the upsetting of the Calcutta mails into 
a river near Jubbelpore. "A khureta from the Viceroy to 
his Highness the Rao Oomaid Singh Bahadoor" orders him 
to put down crime in his dominions, and the humble answer 
of the rao is printed, in which he promises to do his best. 
Paragraphs are given to " the floating - dock at Rangoon ;" 
" the disease among mail-horses ;" " the Suez Canal ;" " the 
forests of Oude ;" and "polygamy among the Hindoos." The 
viceroy contributes a "note on the administration of the 
Khetree chieftainship;" the Bengal Government sends a 



452 Greater Britain. 

memorandum on " bribery of telegraph clerks ;" and the 
Resident of Kotah an official report of the ceremonies attend- 
ing the reception of a vice-regal khnreta restoring the honors 
of a salute to the Maha Rao of Kotah. The khureta was re- 
ceived in state, the letter being mounted alone upon an ele- 
phant magnificently caparisoned, and saluted fi*om the palace 
with 101 guns. There is no honor that we can pay to a 
native prince so great as that of increasing his salute, and, on 
the other hand, when the Guicodar of Baroda allows a suttee, 
or when Jung Bahadoor of Nepaul expresses his intention of 
visiting Paris, we punish them by docking them of two guns, 
or abolishing their salute, according to the magnitude of the 
offense. 

An order in Council confers upon the High-priest of the 
Parsees in the Deccan, " in consideration of his services dur- 
ing the mutiny of 1857," the honorary title of "Khan Baha- 
door." A paragraph announces that an official investigation 
has been made into the supposed desecration by Scindia and 
the viceroy of a mosque at Agra, and that it has been found 
that the place in question was not a mosque at all. Scindia 
had given an entertainment to the viceroy at the Taj Mahal, 
and supper had been laid out at a building in the grounds. 
The native papers said the building was a mosque, but the 
Agra officials triumphantly demonstrated that it had been 
used for a supper to Lord EUenborough after the capture of 
Cabool, and that its name meant " feast-place." " Report on 
the light-houses of the Abyssinian coast ;" "Agreement with 
the Governor of Leh," Thibet, in reference to the trans-Him- 
alayan caravans ; the promotion of one gentleman to be 
" Commissioner of Coorg," and of another to be " Superin- 
tendent of the teak forests of Lower Burmah ;" " Evidence 
on the proposed measures to suppress the abuses of polyandry 
in Travancore and Cochin (by arrangement with the Rajah 
of Travancore) ;" " Dismissal of Policeman Juggernauth Ram- 
kam — Oude division. No. 11 company — for gross miscon- 
duct ;" " Report on the Orissa famine ;" " Plague in Turkey ;" 
" Borer insects in coffee-plantations ;" " Presents to gentlemen 
at Fontainebleau for teaching forestry to Lidian officers ;" 
" Report on the Cotton States of America," for the informa- 
tion of native planters; "Division of Calcutta into postal 



The Gazette. 453 

districts " (in Bengalee as well as English) ; " Late engage- 
ment between the Punjaub cavalry and the Afghan tribes ;" 
"Pension of 3rs. per mensem to the widow (aged 12) of Jam- 
ram Chesa, Sepoy, 27tH Bengal IST. I." are other headings. 
The relative space given to matters of importance and to 
those of little moment is altogether in favor of the latter. 
The government of two millions of people is transferred in 
three lines, but a page is taken up with a list of the caste- 
marks and nose-borings of native women applying for pen- 
sions as soldiers' widows, and two pages are full of advertise- 
ments of lost currency notes. 

The columns of the Gazette, or at all events its supple- 
ments, offer to Government officials whose opinion has been 
asked upon questions on which they possess valuable knowl- 
edge, or in which the people of their district are concerned, 
an opportunity of attacking the acts or laws of the Govern- 
ment itself — a chance of which they are not slow to take ad- 
vantage. One covertly attacks the license-tax; a second, 
under pretense of giving his opinion on some proposed 
change in the contract law, backs the demands of the indigo- 
planters for a law that shall compel specific performance of 
labor-contracts on the part of the workman, and under penalty 
of imprisonment ; another lays all the ills under which India 
can be shown to suffer at the door of the Home Government, 
and points out the ruinous effects of continual changes of 
Indian secretaries in London. 

It would be impossible to overrate the importance of the 
supplements to the Gazette, viewed either as a substitute for a 
system of communicated articles to the native papers, or as 
material for English statesmen, whether in India or at home, 
or as a great experiment in the direction of letting the peo- 
ple of India legislate for themselves. The results of no less 
than three Government inquiries were printed in the supple- 
ment during my stay in India, the first being in the shape of 
a circular to the various local governments requesting their 
opinion oif the proposed extension to natives of the testa- 
mentary succession laws contained in the Indian Civil Code ; 
while the second related to the " ghaut murders," and the 
third to the abuses of polygamy among the Hindoos. The 
second and third inquiries were conducted by means of cir- 



454: Greater Britain. 

culars addressed by Government to those most interested, 
whether native or European. 

The evidence in reply to the " ghaut murder " circular 
was commenced by a letter from the Secretary to the Gov- 
ernment of Bengal to the Secretary to the Government of 
India, calling the attention of the Viceroy in Council to an 
article written in Bengalee by a Hindoo in the Dacca ProTcash 
on the practice of taking sick Hindoos to the river-side to 
die. It appears from this letter that the local governments 
pay careful attention to the opinions of the native papers — 
unless, indeed, we are to accept the view that " the Hindoo " 
was a Government clerk, and the article written to order — 
a supposition favored by its radical and destructive tone. 
The viceroy answered that the local officers and native gen- 
tlemen of all shades of religious opinion were to be privately 
consulted. A confidential communication was then addressed 
to eleven English and four Hindoo gentlemen, and the opin- 
ions of the English and native newspapers were unofficially 
invited. The Europeans were chiefly for the suppression of 
the practice ; the natives — with the exception of one, who 
made a guarded reply — stated that the abuses of the custom 
had been exaggerated, and that they could not recommend 
its suppression. The Government agreed with the natives, 
and decided that nothing should be done — an opinion in 
which the Secretary of State concurred. 

In his reply to the " ghaut murder " circular the represent- 
ative of the orthodox Hindoos, after pointing out that the 
Dacca ProJiash is the Dacca organ of the Brahmos, or Bengal 
Deists, and not of the true Hindoos, went on to quote at length 
from the Hindoo Scriptures passages which show that to die 
in the Ganges water is the most blessed of all deaths. The 
quotations were printed in native character as well as in En- 
glish in the Gazette. One of the officials in his reply pointed 
out that the discouragement of a custom was often as effect- 
ive as its prohibition, and instanced the cessation of the prac- 
tice of " hook-swinging " and " self -mutilation." 

Valuable as is the correspondence as a sample of the meth- 
od pursued in such inquiries, the question under discussion has 
not the importance that attaches to the examination into the 
abuses of the practice of polygamy. 



The Gazette. 455 

To prevent an outcry that the customs of the Hindoo peo- 
ple were being attacked, the Lieutenant-governor of Bengal 
stated in his letters to the Government of India that it was 
his wish that the inquiry should be strictly confined to the 
abuses of Koolin polygamy, and that there should be no gener- 
al examination into ordinary polygamy, which was not opposed 
even by enlightened Hindoos. The polygamy of the Koolin 
Brahmins is a system of taking a plurality of wives as a means 
of subsistence : the Koolins were originally Brahmins of pecul- 
iar merit, and such was their sanctity that there grew up a 
custom of payments being made to them by the fathers of the 
forty or fifty women whom they honored by marriage. So 
greatly has the custom grown that Koolins have sometimes as 
many as eighty wives, and the husband's sole means of sub- 
sistence consists in payments from the fathers of his wives, 
each of whom he visits, however, only once in three or four 
years. The Koolin Brahmins hve in luxury and indolence, 
their wives exist in misery, and the whole custom is plainly 
repugnant to the teachings of the Hindoo Scriptures, and is 
productive of vice and crime. The committee appointed for 
the consideration of the subject by the Lieutenant-governor 
of Bengal — which consisted of two English civilians and five 
natives — ^i-eported that the suggested systems of registration 
of marriages, or of fines increasing in amount for every mar- 
riage after the first, would limit the general liberty of the 
Hindoos to take many T^ives, which they were forbidden to 
touch. On the other hand, to recommend a declaratory law on 
plural marriages would be to break their instructions, which 
ordered them to refrain from giving the sanction of English 
law to Hindoo polygamy. One native dissented from the re- 
port, and favored a declaratory law. ^sjfk 

The English idea of " not recognizing " customs or religions 
which exist among a large number of the inhabitants of En- 
glish countries is a strange one, and productive of much harm. 
It is not necessary, indeed, that we should countenance the 
worship of Juggernauth by ordering our officials to present 
offerings at his shrine, but it is at least necessary that we 
should recognize native customs by legislating to restrain them 
within due limits. To refuse to " recognize" polygamy, which 
is the social state of the vast majority of the citizens of the 



456 Greater Britain. 

British Empire, is not less ridiculous than to refuse to recognize 
that Hindoos are black. 

Recognition is one thing, interference another. How far 
we should interfere with native customs is a question upon 
which no general rule can be given, unless it be that we should 
in all cases of proposed interference with social usages or re- 
ligious ceremonies consult intelligent but orthodox natives, and 
act up to their advice. In Ceylon we have prohibited polyg- 
amy and polyandry, although the law is not enforced ; in India 
we " unofficially ]-ecognize " the custom ; in Singapore we have 
distinctly recognized it by an amendment to the Indian Suc- 
cession Law, which there applies to natives as weU as Eu- 
ropeans. In India we ]Dut do^^ni suttee; while in Australia 
we tolerate customs at least as barbarous. 

One of the social systems which we recognize in India is 
far more revolting to our English feelings than is that of po- 
lygamy- — namely, the custom of polyandry, under which each 
woman has many husbands at a time. This custom we unof- 
ficially recognize as completely as we do polygyny, although 
it prevails only on the Malabar coast and among the hill-tribes 
of the Himalaya, and not among the stiict Hindoos. The 
Thibetan frontier tribes have a singular form of the institu- 
tion, for with them the woman is the wife of all the broth- 
ers of a family, the eldest brother choosing her, and the eldest 
son succeeding to the property of his mother and all her hus- 
bands. In Southern India the polyandry of the present day 
differs little from that which in the middle of the fifteenth 
century Nicolo de Conti found flourishing in Calicut. Each 
woman has several husbands, some as many as ten, who all 
contribute to her maintenance, she living apart from all of 
them ; and the children are allotted to the husbands at the will 
of the wife. 

The toleration of polygyny, or common polygamy, is a vex- 
ed question everywhere. In India all authorities are in favor 
of respecting it ; in IsTatal opinion is the other way. "While 
we suppress it in Ceylon, even among black races conquered 
by us with little pretext only fifty years ago, we are doubtful 
as to the propriety of its suppression by the United States 
among white people, who, whatever was the case with the orig- 
inal leaders, have for the most part settled down in Utah since 



The Gazette. 457 

it has been tlie territory of a nation whose imperial laws pro- 
hibit polygamy in plain terms. 

The inquiries into the abuses of polygamy which have 
lately been conducted in Bengal and in N^atal have revealed 
singular differences between the polygamy of the Hindoos and 
of the hill-tribes, between Indian and Mormon polygamy, and 
between both and the Mohammedan law. The Hindoo laws, 
while they limit the number of legal wives, allow of concu- 
bines, and, in the Maharajah case, Sir Joseph Arnould went 
so far as to say that polygamy and courtesanship are always 
found to flourish side by side, although the reverse is notori- 
ously the case at Salt Lake City, where concubinage is pun- 
ishable, in name at least, by death. Again, polygamy is 
somewhat discouraged by Mohammedan and Hindoo laws, 
and the latter even lay down the sum which in many cases is 
to be paid to the first wife as compensation for the wrong 
done her by the taking of other wives. Among the Mor- 
mons, on the other hand, polygamy is enjoined upon the faith- 
ful, and, so far from feeling herself aggrieved, the first wife 
herself selects the others, or is at the least consulted. Among 
some of the hill-tribes of India, such as the Paharis of Bhau- 
gulpoor, polygamy is encouraged, but with a limitation to 
four wives. 

Among the Mohammedans the number of marriages is re- 
stricted, and divorce is common ; among the Mormons, there 
is no limit — indeed, the more wives the greater a man's glory 
— and divorce is all but unknown. The greatest, however, 
of aU the many differences between Eastern and Mormon 
polygamy lies in the fact that of the Eastern wives one is the 
chief, while Mormon wives are absolutely equal in legitimacy 
and rank. 

Not only is equality the law, but the first wife has recog- 
nized superiority of position over the others in the Mormon 
family. By custom she is always consulted by her husband 
in reference to the choice of a new wife, while the other 
wives are not always asked for their opinion; but this is a 
matter of habit, and the husband is in no way bound by her 
decision. Again, the first wife — if she is a consenting party 
— often gives away the fresh wives at the altar ; but this, too, 
is a mere custom. The fact that in India one of the wives 

U 



458 Greater Britain. 

generally occupies a position of far higher dignity than that 
held by the others will make Indian polygamy easy to de- 
stroy by the lapse of time and operation of social and moral 
causes. As the city-dwelhng natives come to mix more with 
the Europeans they will find that only one of their wives will 
be generally recognized. This will tend of itself to repress 
jDolygamy among the wealthy native merchants and among 
the rajahs who are members of our various councils, and their 
example will gradually react upon the body of the natives. 
Already a majority of the married people of India are mo- 
nogamist by practice, although polygamists in theory ; their 
marriages being limited by poverty, although not by law. 
The classes which have to be reached are the noble families, 
the merchants, and the priests ; and over the two former 
European infljience is considerable, while the inquiry into 
Koolinism has proved that the leading natives will aid us in 
repressing the abuses of polygamy among the priests. 



CHAPTER X. 

UMKITSUK. 

At Umbala I heard that the Sikh pilgrims returning from 
the sacred fair, or great Hindoo camp-meeting, at Hurdwar, 
had been attacked by cholera, and excluded from the town ; 
and as I quitted Umbala in the evening I came upon the 
cholera-stricken train of pilgrims escaping by forced marches 
toward their homes, in many cases a thousand miles away. 
Tall, lithe, long-bearded men, with large hooked noses, high 
foreheads, and thin lips, stalked along, leading by one hand 
their veiled women, who ran behind, their crimson and or- 
ange trowsers stained Avith the dust of travel, while bullock- 
carts decked out with jingling bells bore the tired and the 
sick. Many children of all ages were in the throng. For 
mile after mile I drove through their ranks, as they marched 
with a strange kind of weary haste, and marched, too, with 
few halts, with little rest, if any. One great camp we left 
behind us, but only one ; and all night long we were still 
passing ranks of marching men and women. The march was 
silent ; there was none of the usual chatter of an Indian 



Umkitsur. 459 

crowd ; gloom was in every face, and the people marched 
like a beaten army flying from a destroying foe. 

The disease, indeed, was pressing on their heels. Two 
hundred men and women, as I was told at the Umbala lines, 
had died among them in the single day. Many had drop- 
ped from fright alone ; but the pestilence was in the horde, 
and its seeds were carried into whatever villages the pilgrims 
reached. 

The gathering at Hurdwar had been attended by a million 
people drawn from every part of the Punjaub and North- 
west ; not only Hindoos and Sikhs, but Scindees, Beloochees, 
Pathans, and Afghans had their representatives in this, great 
throng. As we neared the bridge of boats across the Sutlej 
I found that a hurried quarantine had been set up on the 
spot. Only the sick or dying and bearers of corpses were de- 
tained, however ; a few questions were asked of the remain- 
der, and ultimately they were allowed to cross : but driving 
on at speed I reached JuUundur in the morning, only to find 
that the pilgrims had been denied admittance to the town. 
A camp had been formed without the city, to which the pil- 
grims had to go, unless they preferred to straggle on along 
the roads, dropping and dying by the way ; and the villagers 
throughout the country had risen on the wretched people, to 
prevent them returning to their homes. 

It is not strange that the Government of India should late- 
ly have turned its attention to the regulation or suppression 
of these fairs, for the city-dwelling people of North India will 
not continue long to tolerate enormous gatherings at the com- 
mencement of the hot weather, by which the lives of thousands 
must ultimately be lost. At Hurdwar, at Juggernauth, and 
at many other holy spots, hundreds of thousands — ^millions, 
not unf requently — are collected yearly from all parts of India. 
Great princes come down travelling slowly from their capitals 
with trains o" troops and followers so long that they often 
take a day or more to pass a given spot. The Maharajah of 
Cashmere's camp between Kalka and Umbala occupied when 
I saw it more space than that of Aldershot. Camels, women, 
sutlers without count, follow in the train, so that a body of 
five thousand men is multiplied until it occupies the space and 
requires the equipments of a vast army. A huge multitude 



4:Q0 Geeatee Beitain. 

of cultivators, of princes, of f akeers, and of roisterers met for 
the excitement and the pleasures of the camp, is gathered 
about the holy spot. There is religion, and there is trade ; 
indeed, the religious pilgrims are for the most part shrewd 
traders, bent on making a good profit from their visit to the 
fair. 

The gathering at Hurdwar in 1867 had been more than 
usually well attended and successful, when suddenly a rumor 
of cholera was heard ; the police procured the break-up of the 
camp, and Government thought fit to prohibit the visit to 
Simla of the Maharajah of Cashmere. The pilgrims had 
hardly left the camp upon their journey home when cholera 
broke out, and by the time I passed them hundreds were al- 
ready dead, and a panic had spread through India. The chol- 
era soon followed the rumor, and spread even to the healthi- 
est hill-towns, and 6000 deaths occurred in the city of Sri- 
nuggur after the Maharajah's return with his infected escort 
from Hurdwar. A Government which has checked infanti- 
cide and suppressed suttee could not fail to succeed, if it in- 
terfered, in causing these fairs to be held in the cold weather. 

At JuUundur I encountered a terrible dust-storm. It came 
from the south and west, and, to judg'e from its fierceness, 
must have been driven before the wind from the great sandy 
desert of Northern Scinde. The sun was rising for a sultry 
day when from the south there came a blast which in a min- 
ute covered the sky with a leaden cloud, w^hile from the ho- 
rizon there advanced, more slowly, a lurid mass of reddish- 
brown. It soon reached the city, and then, from the wall 
where I sought shelter, nothing could be seen but driving 
sand of ochre color, nothing heard but the shrieking of the 
wind. The gale ceased as suddenly as it began, but left a 
day which, delightful to travellers upon the Indian plains, 
would elsewhere have been called by many a hard name — a 
day of lowering sky and dropping rain, with chiUing cold — 
in short, a day that felt and looked like an English thaw, 
though the thermometer must have stood at 75°, Another 
legacy from the storm was a view of the Himalayas such as is 
seldom given to the dwellers on the plains. Looking at the 
clouds upon the northern horizon I suddenly caught sight of 
the Snowy Range hanging, as it seemed, above them, half-way 



Umritsur. .461 

up the skies. Seen with a foreground of dawk jungle in 
bright bloom, the scene was beautiful ; but the view too dis- 
tant to be grand, except through the ideas of immensity 
called up by the loftiness of the peaks. While crossing the 
Beeas (the ancient Hyphasis, and eastern boundary of the 
Persian Empire in the days of Darius), as I had crossed the 
Sutlej, by a bridge of boats, I noticed that the railway via- 
duct, which was being built for the future Umritsur and Del- 
hi line, stood some way from the deep water of the river ; in- 
deed, stood chiefly upon dry land. The rivers change their 
course so often that the Beeas and Sutlej bridges will each 
have to be made a mile long. There has lately been given us 
in the Punjaub a singular instance of the blind confiderfce in 
which Government orders are carried out by the subordinates. 
The order was that the iron columns on which the Beeas 
bridge was to rest should each be forty-five feet long. In 
placing them, in some cases the bottom of the forty-five feet 
was in the shifting sand, in others it was thirty feet below 
the surface of the solid rock ; but a boring which was need- 
less in the one case and worse than useless in the other has 
been persevered in to the end, the story runs, because it was 
the " hook'm." The Indian rivers are the great bars to road 
and railway making; indeed, except on the Grand Trunk 
road, it may be said that the riv^ers of India are still un- 
bridged. On the chief mail-roads stone causeways are built 
across the river-beds, but the streams are all but impass- 
able during the rains. Even on the road from Kalka to Um- 
bala, however, there is one river-bed without a causeway, 
across which the dawk-gharree is dragged by bullocks, who 
struggle slowly through the sand ; and in crossing it I saw a 
steam-engine lying half -buried in the drift. 

In India we have been sadly neglectful of the roads. The 
Grand Trunk road and the few great railroads are the only 
means of communication in the country. Even between the 
terminus of the Bengal lines at Jubbelpore and of the Bom- 
bay Railroad at Nagpore there was at the time of my visit 
no metalled road, although the distance was but 200 miles, and 
the mails already passed that way. Half a day at least was 
lost upon all the Calcutta letters, and Calcutta passengers for 
Bombay or England were put to an additional expense of 



462. Gkeater Britain. 

some £30 and a loss of a week or ten days in time from the 
absence of 200 miles of road. Until we have good cross- 
roads in India, and metalled roads into the interior from every 
railway station, we shall never succeed in increasing the trade 
of India, nor in civilizing its inhabitants. The Grand Trunk 
road is, however, the best in the world, and is formed of soft 
white nodules, found in beds through North India, which 
when pounded and mixed with water is known as " kunkur," 
and makes a road hard, smooth, clean, and lasting, not unlike 
to that which asphalt gives. 

At Umritsur I first found myself in the true East — the 
East of myrtles, roses, and veiled figures with flashing eyes — 
the East of the " Arabian Nights " and " Lalla Rookh." The 
city itself is Persian, rather than Indian, in its character, and 
is overgrown with date-palms, pomegranates, and the roses 
from which the precious attar is distilled. Umritsur has the 
making of the attar for the world, and it is made from a rose 
which blossoms only once a year. Ten tons of petals of the 
ordinary country rose {Rosa centifolia) are used annually in 
attar-making at Umritsur, and are worth from £20 to £30 a 
ton in the raw state. The petals are placed in the retort 
with a small quantity of water, and heat is applied until the 
water is distilled through a hollow bamboo into a second ves- 
sel, which contains sandal-wood oil. A small quantity of pure 
attar passes with the water into the receiver. The contents 
of the receiver are then poured out, and allowed to stand till 
the attar rises to the surface, in small globules, and is skimmed 
off. The pure attar sells for its weight in silver. 

Umritsur is famous for another kind of merchandise more 
precious even than the attar. It is the seat of the Cashmere 
shawl trade, and three great French firms have their houses in 
the town, where, through the help of friends, shawls may be 
obtained at singularly low prices ; but travellers in far-off re- 
gions are often in the financial position of the Texan hunter 
who was offered a million of acres for a pair of boots — -they 
" have not got the boots." 

It is only shawls of the second class that can be bought 
cheap at Umritsur ; those of the finest quality vary in price 
from £40 to £250, £30 being the cost of the material. The 
shawl manufacture of the Punjaub is not confined to Umritsur; 



Umritsue. 463 

there are 900 shawl-making shops in Loodiana, I was told 
while there. There are more than sixty permanent dies in use 
at the Umritsur shawl shops ; cochineal, indigo, log-wood, 
and saffron are the commonest and best. The shawls are 
made of the down which underlies the hair of the " shawl 
goat " of the higher levels. The yak, the camel, and the dog 
of the Himalayas, all possess this down, as well as their hair 
or wool ; it serves them as a protection against the winter 
cold. Chogas — ^long cloaks used as dressing-gowns by Euro- 
peans — are also made in Umritsur from the soft wool of the 
Bokhara camel, for Umritsur is now the head-quarters of the 
Central Asian trade with Hindostan. 

The bazar is the gayest and most bustling in India — the 
goods of all India and Central Asia are there. Dacca muslin 
— known as " woven air " — lies side by side with thick chogas 
of kinkob and embroidered Cashmere, Indian towels of coarse 
huckaback half cover Chinese watered silks, and the brilliant 
dies of the brocades of Central India are relieved by the mod- 
est grays of the soft puttoo caps. The buyers are as motley 
as the goods — Rajpoots in turbans of deep blue, ornamented 
with gold thread. Cashmere valley herdsmen in strange caps, 
nautch girls from the first three bridges of Srinuggur, some 
of the so-called " hill fanatics," whose only religion is to levy 
contributions on the people of the plains, and Sikh troopers, 
home on leave, stalking through the streets with a haughty 
swagger. Some of the Sikhs wear the pointed helmets of 
their ancestors^ the ancient Sakas ; but whether he be helmeted 
or not, the enormous white beard of the Sikh, the fierce curl 
of his mustache, the cock of the turban, and the amplitude 
of his sash, all suggest the fighting man. The strange close- 
ness of the likeness of the Hungarians to the Sikhs would 
lead one to think that the races are identical. ISTot only are 
they alike in build, look, and warlike habits, but they brush 
their beards in the same fashion, and these little customs en- 
dure longer than manners — ^longer, often, than religion itself. 
One of the crowd was a ruddy-faced, red-bearded, Judas-hair- 
ed fellow, that looked every inch a Fenian, and might have 
stepped here from the Kilkenny wilds ; but the majority of 
the Sikhs had aquiline noses and fine features, so completely 
Jewish of the best and oldest type that I was reminded of Sir 



461 Greater Britain. 

William Jones's fanciful derivation of the Afghan races from 
the lost Ten Tribes of Israel. It may be doubted whether 
the Sikhs, Afghans, Persians, ancient Assyrians, Jews, ancient 
Scythians, and Magyars were not all originally of one stock. 

In India dress stiU serves the purpose of denoting rank. 
The peasant is clothed in cotton, the prince in cloth of gold ; 
and even religion, caste, and occupation are distinguished by 
their several well-known and unchanging marks. Indeed, the 
fixity of fashion is as singular in Hindostan as its infinite 
changeableness in New York or France. The patterns we 
see to-day in the Bombay bazar are those which were popular 
in the days of Shah Jehan. This regulation of dress by cus- 
tom is one of the many difficulties in the way of our English 
manufacturers in their Indian ventures. There has been an 
attempt made lately to bring about the commercial annexatiou 
of India to England : Lancashire is to manufacture the Ion- 
gee, dhotee, and saree, we are told ; Nottingham or Paisley 
are to produce us shumlas ; Dacca is to give way to Norwich, 
and Coventry to supersede Jeypoor. It is strange that men 
of Indian knowledge and experience should be found who fail 
to point out the absurdity of our entertaining hopes of any 
great trade in this direction. The Indian women of the 
humbler castes are the only customers we can hope to have in 
India; the high-caste people wear only ornamented fabrics, 
in the making of which native manufacturers have advantages 
which place them out of the reach of European competition : 
cheap labor ; workmen possessed of singular culture, and of a 
grace of expression w^hich makes their commonest productions 
poems in silk and velvet ; perfect knowledge of their custom- 
ers' wants and tastes ; scrupulous regard to caste conservatism 
— all these are possessed by the Hindoo manufacturer, and 
absent in the case of the firms of Manchester and Rochdale. 
As a rule, all Indian dress is best made by hand ; only the 
coarsest and least ornamented fabrics can be largely manufac- 
tured at paying rates in England. As for the clothing of the 
poorer people, the men for the most part Avear nothing, the 
women little, and that little washed often, and changed never. 
Even for the roughest goods we can not hope to undersell the 
native manufacturers by much in the Presidency towns. Up 
country, if we enter into the competition, it can scarcely fail 



Umritsur. 465 

to be a losing one. England is not more unlikely to be clothed 
from India than India from Great Britain. If European ma- 
chinery is needed, it will be erected in Yokohama or in Bom- 
bay, not in the West Riding. 

It is hardly to be believed that Englishmen have for some 
years been attempting to induce the natives to adopt our 
flower-patterns — peonies, butterflies, and all. Ornament in 
India is always subordinate to the purpose which the object 
has to serve. Hindoo art begins where English ends. The 
principles which centuries of study have given us as the max- 
ims upon which the grammar of ornament is based are those 
which are instinctive in every native workman. Every cos- 
tume, every vase, every temple and bazar in India gives eye- 
witness that there is truth in the saw that the finest taste is 
consistent with the deepest slavery of body, with the utmost 
slavishness of mind. A Hindoo of the lowest caste will spurn 
the gift of a turban or a loin-cloth the ornamentation of which 
consists not with his idea of symmetry and grace. Nothing 
could induce a Hindoo to clothe himself in such a gaudy, 
masquerading dress as maddens a Maori with delight and his 
friends with jealousy and mortification. In art as in deport- 
ment, the Hindoo loves harmony and quiet ; and dress with 
the Oriental is an art : there is as much feeling — as deep 
poetry — in the curves of the Hindoo saree as in the outlines 
of the Taj. 

Umritsur is the spiritual capital of the Sikhs, and the Dur- 
bar Temple in the centre of the town is the holiest of their 
shrines. It stands, with the sunbeams glancing from its gild- 
ed roof, in the middle of a very holy tank, filled with huge 
weird fish-monsters that look as though they fed on men, and 
glare at you through cruel eyes. 

Leaving your shoes outside the very precincts of the tank, 
with the police guard that we have stationed there, you skirt 
one side of the water, and then leave the mosaic terrace for a 
still more gorgeous causeway, that, bordered on either side 
by rows of golden lamp-supporters, carries the path across 
toward the rich pavilion, the walls of which are as thickly 
spread with gems as are those of Akbar's palace. Here you 
are met by a bewildering din, for under the inner dome sit 
worshipers by the score, singing with vigor the grandest of 

U2 



4:Q6 Greater Britain. 

barbaric airs to the accompaniment of lyi*e, harp, and tomtom, 
while in the centre, on a cushion, is a long-bearded, gray old 
gooroo, or priest of the Sikh religion^a creed singularly pure, 
thouirh little known. The effect of the scene is much en- 
hanced by the beauty of the surrounding houses, whose oriel 
windows overhang the tank, that the Sikh princes may watch 
the evolutions of the lantern-bearing boats on nights when the 
temple is illuminated. When seen by moonlight the tank is 
a very picture from the "Arabian Nights." 

This is a time of ferment in the Sikh religion. A carpen. 
ter named Ram Singh — a man with all that combination of 
shrewdness and imagination, of enthusiasm and worldliness, 
by which the world is governed — another Mohammed or Brig- 
ham Young, perhaps — ^has preached his way through the Pun- 
jaub, infusing his own energy into others, and has drawn away 
from the Sikh Church some hundred thousand followers — re- 
formers — who call themselves the Kookas. These modern 
Anabaptists — for many are disposed to look upon Ram Singh 
as another John of Leyden — ^bind themselves by some terrible 
and secret oath, and the Government fear that reformation of 
religion is to be accompanied by reformation of the State of 
a kind not advantageous to the English power. When Ram 
Singh lately proclaimed his intention of visiting the Durbar 
Temple the gooroos incited the Sikh fanatics to attack his 
men with clubs, and the military police were forced to inter- 
fere. There is now, however, a Kooka temple at Lahore. 

In spite of religious ferment, there is little in the bazar or 
temples of Umritsur to remind one of the times— only some 
twenty years ago — when the Sikh army crossed the Sutlej, 
and its leaders threatened to sack Delhi and Calcutta, and 
drive the English out of India ; it is impossible, however, to 
believe that there is no under-current in existence. Eighteen 
years can not have sufficed to extinguish the Sikh nationality, 
and the men who beat us at Chillianwallah are not yet dead, 
or even old. When the Maharajah Dhuleep Singh returned 
from England in 1864 to bury his mother's body the chiefs 
crowded round him as he entered Lahore, and besought him 
to resume his position at their head. His answer was a 
haughty "Jao !" (" Begone !") If the Sikhs are to rise once 
more they will look elsewhere for their leader. 



Lahore. 467 



CHAPTER XL 

LAHOEE. 

CEOSSiNa in a railway journey of an hour one of the most 
fertile districts of the Panjaub, I was struck with the resem- 
blance of the country to South Australia : in each great 
sweeps of wheat-growing lands, with here and there an acacia 
or mimosa tree ; in each a climate hot, but dry, and not un- 
healthy — singularly hot here for a tract in the latitude of 
Vicksburg, near which the Mississippi is som_etimes frozen. 

Through groves of a yellow-blossomed, sweet-scented, weep- 
ing acacia, much like laburnum, in which the fortified railway 
station seems out of place, I reached the tomb-surrounded 
garden that is called Lahore — a city of promegranates, olean- 
ders, hollyhocks, and roses. The date-groves of Lahore are 
beautiful beyond description ; especially so the one that hides 
the Agra Bank. 

Lahore matches Umritsur in the purity of its Orientalism, 
Agra in the strength and grandeur of its walls : but it has no 
Tank Temple and no Taj ; the Great Mosque is commonplace, 
Runjeet Singh's tomb is tawdry, and the far-famed Shalimar 
Gardens inferior to those of Pinjore. The strangest sight of 
Lahore is its new railway station — a fortress of red brick, one 
of many which are rising all over India. The fortification 
of the railway stations is decidedly the next best step to that 
of having no forts at all. 

The city of Lahore is surrounded by a suburb of great 
tombs, in which Europeans have in many cases taken up their 
residence by permission of the owner, the mausoleums being, 
from the thickness of their walls, as cool as cellars. Some- 
times, however, a fanatical relative of the man buried in the 
tomb will warn the European tenant that he will die within a 
year — a prophecy which poison has once or twice brought to 
its fulfillment in the neighborhood of Lahore and at Moultan. 

StrolHng in the direction of the Cabool Gate, I came on the 
Lieutenant-governor of the Punjaub driving in an open car- 
riage drawn by camels ; and passing out on to the plain, I met 



468 Gkeater Britain. 

all the officers in garrison returning on Persian ponies from a 
game at the Afghan sport of " hockey upon horseback," while a 
little farther were some English ladies with hawks. Through- 
out the Northern Punjaub a certain settling down in "Comfort 
on the part of the English officials is to be remarked, and the 
adaptations of native habits to English uses, of which I had 
in one evening's walk the three examples which I have men- 
tioned, is a sign of a tendency toward that making the best of 
things which in a newly-occupied country precedes the en- 
trance upon a system of permanent abode. Lahore has been 
a British city for nineteen years, Bombay for two centuries 
and more ; yet Lahore is far more English than Bombay. 

Although there are as yet no signs of English settlement in 
the Punjaub, still the official community in many a Punjaub 
station is fast becoming colonial in its type, and Indian tradi- 
tions are losing ground. English wives and sisters abound in 
Lahore, even the railway and canal officials having brought 
out their families ; and during the cool weather race meetings, 
drag-hunts, cricket-matches, and croquet-parties follow one 
another from day to day, and Lahore boasts a volunteer corps. 
When the hot season comes on those who can escape to the 
hills, and the wives and children of those who can not go run 
to Dalhousie, as Londoners do to Eastbourne. 

The healthy English tone of the European communities of 
Umritsur and Lahore is reflected in the newspapers of the 
Punjaub, which are the best in India, although the blunders 
of the native printers render the " betting news " unintelligi- 
ble, and the " cricket scores " obscure. The columns of the 
Lahore papers present as singular a mixture of incongruous 
articles as even the Government Gazette offers to its readers. 
An official notice that it will be impossible to allow more than 
560 elephants to take part in the next Lucknow procession 
follows a report of the " ice meeting " of the community of 
Lahore to arrange about the next supply ; and side by side 
with this is an article on the Punjaub trade with Chinese 
Tartary, which recommends the Government of India to con- 
quer Afghanistan, and to re-occupy the valley of Cashmere. 
A paragraph notices the presentation by the Punjaub Gov- 
ernment to a native gentleman, who has built a serai at his 
own cost, of a valuable gift ; another records a brush with the 



Lahore. 469 

Wagheers. The only police case is the infliction on a sweeper 
of a fine of thirty rupees for letting his donkey run against a 
high-caste woman, whereby she was defiled; but a European 
magistrate reprimands a native pleader for appearing in court 
with his shoes on ; and a notice from the lieutenant-governor 
gives a list of the holidays to be observed by the courts, in 
which the " Queen's Birthday " comes between " Bhudur Ka- 
lee" and " Oors data Gunjbuksh," while "Christmas" follows 
"Shubberat," and "Ash Wednesday" precedes "Holee." 
As one of the holidays lasts a fortnight, and many more than 
a week, the total number of dies non is considerable ; but a 
postscript decrees that additional local holidays shall be grant- 
ed for fairs and festivals, and for the solar and lunar eclipse, 
which brings the no-court days up to sixty or seventy, besides 
those in the Long Vacation. The Hindoos are in the happy 
position of having also six New Year's Days in every twelve- 
month ; but the editor of one of the Lahore papers says that 
his Mohammedan compositors manifest a singular interest in 
Hindoo feasts, which shows a gratifying spread of toleration ! 
An article on the " Queen's English in Hindostan," in the Pun- 
jauh Times, gives, as a specimen of the poetry of Young 
Bengal, a serenade in which the skylark carols on the prim- 
rose bush. " Emerge my love," the poet cries : 

" The fragrant, dewy grove 
"We'll wander through till gun-fire bids us part." 

But the final stanza is the best : 

" Then, Leila, come ! nor longer cogitate ; 
Thy egress let no scruples dire retard ; 
Contiguous to the portals of thy gate 
Suspensively I supplicate regard." 

The advertisements range from books on the languages of 
Dardistan to Government contracts for elephant fodder, or 
price-lists of English beer ; and an announcement of an Afghan 
history in the Urdu tongue is followed by a prospectus of Berk- 
hampstead Grammar School. King Edward would rub his 
eyes were he to wake and find himself being advertised in 
Lahore. 

The Punjaub Europeans, with their English newspapers 
and English ways, are strange governors for an empire con- 
quered fi'om the bravest of all Eastern races little more than 



470 Greater Britain. 

eighteen years ago. One of them, taking up a town poHce- 
man's staff, said to me one day, " Who could have thought 
in 1850 that in 1867 we should be ruling the Sikhs with this ?" 



CHAPTER XII. 

OUE INDIAN AEMT. 

During my stay in Lahore a force of Sikhs and Pathans 
was being raised for service at Hong Kong by an officer stay- 
ing in the same hotel with myself, and a large number of men 
were being enlisted in the city by recruiting parties of the Bom- 
bay army. In all parts of India we are now relying, so far as 
our native forces are concerned, upon the men who only a few 
years back were by much our most dangerous foes. 

Throughout the East subjects concern themselves but little 
in the quarrels of their princes, and the Sikhs are no exception 
to the rule. They fought splendidly in the Persian ranks at 
Marathon; under Shere Singh they made their memorable 
stand at Chillionwallah ; but under Nicholson they beat the 
bravest of the Bengal sepoys before Delhi. Whether they 
fight for us or against us is aU one to them. They fight for 
those who pay them, and have no politics beyond their pock- 
ets. So far, they seem useful allies to us, who hold the purse 
of India. Unable to trust Hindoos with arms, we can at least 
rule them by the employment as soldiers of their fiercest ene- 
mies. 

When we come to look carefully at our system its morality 
is hardly clear. As we administer the revenues of India nom- 
inally at least, for the benefit of the Indians, it might be ar- 
gued that we may fairly keep on foot such troops as are best 
fitted to secure her against attack; but the argument breaks 
down when it is remembered that 70,000 British troops are 
maintained in India from the Indian revenues for that pur- 
pose, and that local order is secured by an ample force of mil- 
itary police. Even if the employment of Sikhs in times of 
emergency may be advisable, it can not be denied that the day 
has gone by for permanently overawing a people by means of 
standing armies composed of their hereditary foes. 

In discussing the question of the Indian armies we have 



Our Indian Army. 471 

carefully to distinguish between the theory and the practice. 
The Indian official theory says that not only is the native army 
a valuable auxiliary to the English army in India, but that 
its moral effect on the people is of great benefit to us, inas- 
much as it raises their self-respect, and offers a career to men 
who would otherwise be formidable enemies. The practice 
proclaims that the native troops are either dangerous or use- 
less by arming them with weapons as antiquated as the bow 
and arrow, destroys the moral effect which might possibly be 
produced by a Hindoo force by filling the native ranks with 
Sikh and Goorkha aliens and heretics, and makes us enemies 
without number by denying to natives that promotion which 
the theory holds out to them. The existing system is official- 
ly defended by the most contradictory arguments, and on the 
most shifting of grounds. Those who ask why we should not 
trust the natives, at all events to the extent of allowing Ben- 
gal and Bombay men to serve, and to serve with arms that 
they can use, in bodies which profess to be the Bengal and 
Bombay armies, but which in fact are Sikh regiments which 
we are afraid to arm, are told that the native army has muti- 
nied times without end, that it has never fought well except 
where, from, the number of British present, it had no choice 
but to fight, and that it is dangerous and inefficient. Those 
who ask why this shadow of a native army should be retained 
are told that its records of distinguished service in old times 
are numerous and splendid. The huge British force main- 
tained in India, and the still huger native army, are each of 
them made an excuse for the retention of the other at the ex- 
isting standard. If you say that it is evident that 70,000 Brit- 
ish troops can not be needed in India, you are told that they 
are required to keep the 120,000 native troops in check. If 
you ask, Of what use, then, are the latter ? you hear that in the 
case of a serious imperial war the English troops would be 
withdrav/n, and the defense of India confided to these very 
natives who in time of peace require to be thus severely held 
in check. Such shallow arguments would be instantly exposed 
were not English statesmen bribed by the knowledge that 
their acceptance as good logic allows us to maintain at India's 
cost 70,000 British soldiers, who in time of danger would be 
available for our defense at home. 



472 Greater Britain. 

That the English force of 70,000 men maintained in India 
in time of peace can be needed there in peace or war is not to 
be supposed by those who remember that 10,000 men were 
all that were really needed to suppress the wide-spread mutiny 
of 1857, and that Russia — our only possible enemy from with- 
out — never succeeded during a two years' war in her own ter- 
ritory in placing a disposable army of 60,000 men in the Cri- 
mea. Another mutiny such as that of 1857 is, indeed, impos- 
sible, now that we retain both forts and artillery exclusively 
in British hands ; and Russia having to bring her supplies and 
men across almost boundless deserts, or through hostile Af- 
ghanistan, would be met at the Khyber by our whole Indian 
army, concentrated from the most distant stations at a few 
days' notice, fighting in a well-known and friendly country, 
and supplied from the plains of all India by the railroads. 
Our English troops in India are sufficiently numerous, were it 
necessary, to fight both the Russians and our native army ; 
but it is absurd that we should maintain in India, in a time of 
perfect peace, at a yearly cost to the people of that country 
of fi'om fourteen to sixteen millions sterling, an army fit to 
cope with the most tremendous disasters that could overtake 
the country, and at the same time unspeakably ridiculous that 
we should in all our calculations be forced to set down the 
native army as a cause of weakness. The native rulers, more- 
over, whatever their unpopularity with their people, were al- 
ways able to array powerful levies against enemies from with- 
out ; and if our government of India is not a miserable failure, 
our influence over the lower classes of the people ought, at the 
least, to be little inferior to that exercised by the Mogul em- 
perors or the Maratta chiefs. 

As for local risings, concentration of our troops by means 
of the railroads that would be constructed in half a dozen 
years out of our military savings alone, and which American 
experience shows us can not be effectually destroyed, would 
be amply sufficient to deal with them were the force reduced 
to 30,000 men : and a general rebellion of the people of India 
we have no reason to expect, and no right to resist should it 
by any combination of circumstances be brought about. 

The taxation required to maintain the present Indian army 
presses severely upon what is in fact the poorest country in 



OuE Indian Army. 473 

the world ; the yearly drain of many thousand men weighs 
heavily upon us; and our systenj seems to proclaim to the 
world the humiliating fact that under British government, 
and in times of peace, the most docile of all peoples need an 
army of 200,000 men, in addition to the military police, to 
watch them, or keep them down. 

Whatever the decision come to with regard to the details 
of the changes to be made in the Indian army system, it is at 
least clear that it will be expedient in us to reduce the En- 
glish army in India if we intend it for India's defense, and 
our duty to abolish it if we intend it for our own. It is also 
evident that, after allowing for mere police duties — which 
should in all cases be performed by men equipped as, and 
called by the name of, police — the native army should, what- 
ever its size, be rendered as effective as possible by instruc- 
tion in the use of the best weapons of the age. If local in- 
surrections have unfortunately to be quelled, they must be 
quelled by English troops ; and against European invaders, 
na^ves troops, to be of the slightest service, must be armed 
as Europeans. As the possibility of European invasion is re- 
mote, it would probably be advisable that the native army 
should be gradually reduced until brought to the point of 
merely supplying the body-guards and ceremonial-troops ; at 
at all events, the practice of overawing Sikhs with Hindoos, 
and Hindoos with Sikhs, should be abandoned as inconsistent 
with the nature of our government in India, and with the first 
principles of freedom. 

There is, however, no reason why we should wholly de- 
prive ourselves of the services of the Indian warrior tribes. 
If we are to continue to hold sucfi outposts as Gibraltar, the 
duty of defending them against all comers might not improp- 
erly be intrusted wholly or partly to the Sikhs or fiery little 
Goorkhas, on the ground that, while almost as brave as Eu- 
ropean troops, they are somewhat cheaper. It is possible, 
indeed, that, just as we draw our Goorkhas from independ- 
ent ISTepaul, other European nations may draw Sikhs from 
us. "We are not even now the only rulers who emjjloy Sikhs 
in war ; the Khan of Kokand is said to have many in his 
service : and, tightly ruled at home, the Punjaubees may not 
improbably become the Swiss of Asia. 



474 Greater Britain. 

Whatever the European force to be maintained in India, 
it is clear that it should be local. The queen's army system 
has now had ten years' trial, and has failed in every point in 
which failure was prophesied. The officers, hating India, and 
having no knowledge of native languages or customs, bring 
our Government into contempt among the people ; recruits 
in England dread enlistment for service they know not where ; 
and Indian tax-payers complain that they are forced to sup- 
port an army over the disposition of which they have not the 
least control, and which in time of need would probably be 
withdrawn from India. Even the Dutch, they say, maintain 
a purely colonial force in Java, and the French have pledged 
themselves that, when they withdraw the Algerian local 
troops, they will replace them by regiments of the line. En- 
gland and Spain alone maintain purely imperial troops at the 
expense of their dependencies. 

Were the European army in India kept separate from the 
English service it would be at once less costly and more effi- 
cient, while the officers would be acquainted with the habits 
of the natives and customs of the ' country, and not, as at 
present, mere birds of passage, careless of offending native 
prejudice, indifferent to the feelings of those among whom 
they have to live, and occupied each day of their idle life in 
heartily wishing themselves at home again. There are, in- 
deed, to the existing system drawbacks more serious than 
have been mentioned. Sufficient stress has not hitherto been 
laid upon the demoralization of our army, and danger to our 
home freedom that must result from the keeping in India of 
half our regular force. It is hard to believe that men who 
have periodically to go through such scenes as those of 1857, 
or who are in daily contact with a cringing dark-skinned race 
can in the long run continue to be firm friends to constitu- 
tional liberty at home ; and it should be remembered that the 
English troops in India, though under the orders of the com- 
mander-in-chief, are practically independent of the House of 
Commons. 

It is not only constitutionally that Indian rotation service 
is bad. The system is destructive to the discipline of our 
troops, and a separate service is the only remedy. 



KussiA. 475 



CHAPTER XIIL 

RUSSIA. 

Foe fifty years or more we have been warned that one day 
we must encomiter Russia, and for fifty years Muscovite ar- 
mies, conquering their way step by step, have been advancing 
southward, till we find England and Russia now all but face 
to face in Central Asia. 

Steadily the Russians are advancing. Their circular of 
1864, in which they declared that they had reached their wish- 
ed-for frontier, has been altogether forgotten, and all Kokand 
and portions of Bokhara have been swallowed up, while our 
spies in St. Petersburg tell the Indian Council that Persia her- 
self is doomed. Although, however, the distance of the Rus- 
sian from the English frontiers has been greatly reduced of 
late, it is still far more considerable than is supposed. Instead 
of the Russian outposts being 100 miles from Peshawur, as 
one alarmist has said, they are still 400 ; and Samarcand, their 
nearest city, is 450 miles in a straight line over the summit 
of the Hindoo Koosh, and 150 by road from our frontier at 
the Khyber. At the same time we must, in our calculations 
of the future, assume that a few years will see Russia at the 
northern base of the Hindoo Koosh, and in a position to over- 
run Persia and take Herat. 

It has been proposed that we should declare to Russia 
our intention to preserve Afghanistan as neutral ground ; but 
there arises this difficulty, that having agreed to this plan, Rus- 
sia would immediately proceed to set about ruling Afghan- 
istan through Persia. On the other hand, it is impossible, 
as we have already found, to treat with Afghanistan, as there 
is no Afghanistan with which to treat ; nor can we enter into 
friendly relations with any Afghan chief, lest his neighbor and 
enemy should hold us responsible for his acts. If we are to 
have any dealings with the Afghans we shall soon be forced to 
take a side, and necessarily to fight and conquer, but at a great 
cost in men and money. It might be possible to make friends 
of some of the frontier tribes by giving them lands within our 



476 Geeater Britain. 

borders on condition of their performing military service and 
respecting the lives and property of our merchants ; but the 
policy would be costly, and its results uncertain, vrhile we 
should probably soon find ourselves embroiled in Afghan pol- 
itics. Moreover, meddling in Afghanistan, long since proved 
to be a foolish and a dangerous course, can hardly be made a 
wise one by the fact of the Russians being at the gate. 

Many would have us advance to Herat, on the ground that 
it is in Afghanistan, and not on the plains of India, that Rus- 
sia must be met ; but such is the fierceness of the Afghans, 
such the poverty of their country, that its occupation would 
be at once a source of weakness and a military trap to the in- 
vader. Were we to occupy Herat, we should have Persians 
and Afghans alike against us ; were the Russians to annex 
Afghanistan, they could never descend into the plains of India 
without a little diplomacy or a little money from us bringing 
the Afghan fanatics upon their rear. When, indeed, we look 
carefully into the meaning of those Anglo-Indians who would 
have us repeat our attempt to thrash the Afghans into loving 
us, we find that the pith of their complaint seems to be that 
battles and conquests mean promotion, and that we have no 
one left in India upon whom we can wage war. Civilians 
look for new appointments, military men for employment, 
missionaries for fresh fields, and all see their opening in an- 
nexation, while the newspapers echo the cry of their readers, 
and call on the viceroy to annex Afghanistan " at the cost 
of impeachment." 

Were our frontier at-Peshawur a good one for defense 
there could be but little reason sho^vn for an occupation of 
any part of Afghanistan ; but as it is, the question of the de- 
sirability of an advance is complicated by the lamentable 
weakness of our present frontier. Were Russia to move 
down upon India we should have to meet her either in Af- 
ghanistan or upon the Indus : to meet her at Peshawur, at the 
foot of the mountains and with the Indus behind us, would 
be a military suicide. Of the two courses that would be open 
to us, a retreat to the Indus would be a terrible blow to the 
confidence of our troops, and an advance to Cabool or Herat 
would be an advance out of reach of our railroad communica- 
tions ^and through a dangerous defile. To maintain our fron- 



EussiA. 477 

tier force at Peshawur, as we now do, is to maintain in a pes- 
tilential valley a force which, if attacked, could not fight 
where it is stationed, but would be forced to advance into 
Afghanistan or retreat to the Indus. The best policy would 
probably be to withdraw the Europeans from Peshawur and 
Rawul Pindee, and place them upon the Indus in the hills 
near Attock, completing our railroad from Attock to Lahore, 
and from Attock to the hill station, and to leave the native 
force to defend the Khyber and Peshawur against the mount- 
ain tribes. We should also encourage European settlement 
in the valley of Cashmere. On the other hand, we should 
push a short railroad from the Indus to the Bholan Pass, and 
there concentrate a second powerful European force, with a 
view to resisting invasion at that point, and of taking in flank 
and rear any invader who might advance upon the Khyber. 
The Bholan Pass is, moreover, on the road to Candahar and 
Herat ; and, although it would be a mistake to occupy those 
cities except by the wish of the Afghans, stUl the advance of 
the Russians will probably one day force the Afghans to ally 
themselves to us, and solicit the occupation of their cities. 
The fact that the present ruler of Herat is a mere tool of the 
Persians or feudatory of the Czar, wiU have no effect what- 
ever on his country, for if he once threw himself openly into 
Russian hands, his people would immediately desert him. So 
much for the means of defense against the Russians ; but there 
is some chance that we may have to defend India against an- 
other Mohammedan invasion, secretly countenanced, but not 
openly aided by Russia. While on my way to England I had 
a conversation on this matter with a well-iixformed Syrian 
Pacha, but notorious Russian-hater. He had been telling me 
that Russian policy had not changed, but was now, as ever, 
a policy of gradual annexation ; that she envied our position in 
India, and hated us because our gentle treatment of Asiatics 
is continually held up to her as an example. " Russia has at- 
tacked you twice in India, and will attack you there again," he 
said. Admitting her interference in the Afghan war, I denied 
that it was proved that she had any influence in Hindostan, or 
any hand in the rebellion of 1857. My friend made me no 
spoken answer, but took four caskets that stood upon the ta- 
ble, and setting them in a row, with an interval between them, 



478 G-KEATER Britain. 

pushed the first so that it struck the second, the second the 
third, and the third the fourth. Then, looking up, he said, 
" There you have the manner of the Russian move on India. 
I push No. 1, but you see No. 4 moves. 1 influences 2, 2 in* 
fluences 3, and 3 influences 4 ; but 1 doesn't influence 4. Oh, 
dear me, no ! Very likely even 1 and 3 are enemies, and hate 
each other ; and if 3 thought that she was doing I's work, she 
would kick over the traces at once. Nevertheless, she is 
doing it. In 1857 Russia certainly struck at you through 
Egypt, and probably through Central Asia also. Lord Pal. 
merston was afraid to send troops through Egypt, though if 
that could have been largely done, the mutiny could have 
been put down in half the time, and with a quarter the cost ; 
and Nana Sahib in his proclamation stated, not without reason, 
that Egypt was on his side. The way you are being now at- 
tacked is this : Russia and Egypt are for the moment hand 
and glove, though their ultimate objects are conflicting. 
Egypt is playing for the leadership of all Islam, even of Mos- 
lems in Central Asia and India. Russia sees that this game is 
for the time her game, as through Egypt she can excite the 
Turcomans, Afghans, and other Moslems of Central Asia to 
invade India in the name of religion and the pro})het, but, in 
fact, in the hope of plunder, and can also at the same time 
raise your Mohammedan population in Hindostan — a popu- 
lation over which you admit you have absolutely no hold. Of 
course you will defeat these hordes whenever you meet them 
in the field ; but their numbers are incalculable, and their brav- 
ery great. India has twice before been conquered from the 
north, from Central Asia, and you must remember that behind 
these hordes comes Russia herself. Mohammedanism is weak 
here, on the Mediterranean, I grant you ; but it is very strong 
in Central Asia — as strong as it ever was.. Can you trust 
your Sikhs, too ? I doubt it." 

When I asked the Pacha how Egypt was to put herself at 
the head of Islam, he answered, •' Thus. We Egyptians are 
already supporting the Turkish Empire. Our tribute is a 
million (francs), but we pay five millions, of which four go 
into the Sultan's privy purse. We have all the leading men 
of Turkey in our pay : 30,000 of the best troops serving in 
Crete, ani the whole of the fleet are contributed by Egypt. 



EussiA. 479 

Now Egypt had no small share in getting up the Cretan in- 
surrection, and yet, you see, she does, or pretends to do, her 
best to put it down. The Sultan, therefore, is at the vice- 
roy's mercy, if you don't interfere. No one else will if you 
do not. The viceroy aims at being nominally, as he is real- 
ly, ' the Grand Turk.' Once Sultan, with Crete and the other 
islands handed over to Greece or Russia, the present viceroy 
commands the allegiance of every Moslem people — thirty mil- 
lions of your Indian subjects included ; that is, j)ractically 
Russia commands that allegiance — Russia practically, though 
not nominally, at Constantinople wields the power of Islam, 
instead of being hated by every true believer, as she would be 
if she annexed Turkey in Europe. Her real game is a far 
grander one than that with which she is credited." " Turkey 
is your vassal," the Pacha went on to say ; " she owes her ex- 
istence entirely to you. "Why not use her then ? Why not 
put pressure on the Sultan to exert his influence over the 
Asian tribes — which is far greater than you believe — ^for your 
benefit ? Why not insist on your Euphrates route ? Why 
not insist on Egypt ceasing to intrigue against you, and an- 
nex the country if she continues in her present course ? If 
you wish to bring matters to a crisis, make Abdul Aziz insist 
on Egypt being better governed, or on the slave-trade being 
put down. You have made your name a laughing-stock here. 
You let Egypt half bribe, half force Turkey into throwing 
such obstacles in the way of your Euphrates route that it is 
no nearer completion now than it ever was. You force Egyj)t 
to pass a law abolishing the slave-trade and slavery itself, and 
you have taken no notice of the fact that this law has never 
been enforced in so much as a single instance. You think 
that you are all right now that you have managed to force 
our Government into allowing your troops to pass to and fro 
through Egypt, thus making your road through the territory 
of your most dangerous enemy. Where would you be in 
case of a war with Russia •?" 

When I pleaded that, if we were refused jDassage, we 
should occupy the country, the Pacha replied, " Of course 
you would ; but you need not imagine that you will ever be 
refused passage. What will happen will be that, just at the 
time of your greatest need, the floods will come doAvn from 



480 Greater Britain. 

the mountains, and wash away ten miles of the line, and all 
the engines mil go out of repair. You will complain: we 
shall offer to lay the stick about the feet of all the employes 
of the line. What more would you have ? Can we prevent 
the floods? When our Government wished to keep your 
Euphrates scheme from coming to any thing, did they say, 
* Do this thing, and we will raise Islam against you ?' Oh 
no ! they just bribed your surveyors to be attacked by the 
Bedouin, or they bribed a pacha to tell you that the water 
was alkaline and poisonous for the next hundred miles, and 
so on, till your company was ruined, and the plan at an end 
for some years. Your Home Government does not under- 
stand us Easterns. Why don't you put your Eastern affairs 
into the hands of your Indian Government ? You have two 
routes to India — ^Egypt and Euphrates Valley, and both are 
practically in the hands of your only great enemy — Kussia." 

In all that my Syrian friend said of the danger of our re- 
lying too much upon our route across Egypt, and on the im- 
portance to us of the immediate construction of the Euphrates 
Valley Railway line, there is nothing but truth, but, in his 
fears of a fresh invasion of India by the Mohammedans, he 
forgot that for fighting purposes the Mohammedans are no 
longer one, but two peoples ; for the Moslem races are di- 
vided into Sonnites and Shiites, or orthodox and dissenting 
Mohammedans, who hate each other far more fiercely than 
they hate us. Our Indian Moslems are orthodox, the Af- 
ghans and Persians are dissenters, the Turks are orthodox. 
If Egypt and Persia play Russia's game, we may count upon 
the support of the Turks of Syria, of the Euphrates Valley, 
and of India. To unite Irish Catholics and Orangemen in a 
religious crusade against the English would be an easy task 
by the side of that of uniting Sonnite and Shiite against 
India. A merely Shiite invasion is always possible, but could 
probably be met with ease, by opj)Osition at the Khyber, and 
resistance upon the Indus, followed by a rapid advance from 
the Bholan. Russia herself is not without her difficulties 
with the strictest and most fanatical Mohammedans. I^ow 
that she has conquered Bokhara, their most sacred land, they 
hate her as fiercely as they hate us. The crusade, if she pro- 
vokes it, may be upon our side, and British commanders in 



KussiA. 481 

green turbans may yet summon the Faithful to arms, and in- 
voke the Prophet. 

It is to be remarked that men who have lived long in India 
think that our policy in the East has overwhelming claims on 
the attention of our home authorities. Not only is Eastern 
business to be performed, and Eastern intrigues watched care- 
fully, but according to these Indian flies, who think that their 
Eastern cart-wheel is the world, Oriental policy, is to guide 
home policy, to dictate our European friendships, to cause 
our wars. 

"No Englishman in England can sympathize with the ridic- 
ulous inability to comprehend our real position in India which 
. leads many Anglo-Indians to cry out that we must go to war 
with Russia to " keep up our prestige ;" and, on the other 
hand, it need hardly be shown that, apart from the extension 
of trade and the improvement of communication, we need not 
trouble ourselves with alliances to strengthen us in the East. 
Supported by the native population, we can maintain our- 
selves in India against the world ; unsupported by them, our 
rule is morally indefensible, and therefore not long to be re- 
tained by force of arms. 

The natives of India watch with great interest the advance 
of Russia ; not that they believe that they would be any better 
off under her than under us, but that they would like, at all 
events, to see some one thrash us, even if in the end they lost 
by it ; just as a boy likes to see a new bully thrash his former 
master, even though the later be also the severer tyrant. That 
the great body of the people of India watch with feverish ex- 
citement the advance of Russia is seen from the tone of the 
native press, which is also of service to us in demonstrating 
that the mass of the Hindoos -are incapable of appreciating 
the benefits, and even of comprehending the character, of our 
rule. They can understand the strength which a steady pur- 
pose gives ; they can not grasp the principles which lie at the 
root of our half-mercantile, half-benevolent despotism. 

No native believes that we shall permanently remain in In- 
dia; no native really sympathized with us during the rebel- 
lion. To the people of India we English are a mystery. We 
profess to love them, and to be educating them for something 
they can not comprehend, which we call freedom and self-gov- 

X 



482 Greater Britain. 

eminent ; in the mean time, while we do not plunder them, 
nor convert them forcibly, after the wont of the Mogul em- 
perors, we kick and cufE them all round, and degrade the no- 
bles by ameliorating the condition of humbler men. 

No mere policy of disarmament or of oppression can be 
worth much as a system for securing lasting peace ; for if our 
Irish constabulary can not prevent the introduction of Fenian 
arms to Cork and DubHn, how doubly impossible must it be 
to guard a frontier of five or six thousand miles by means of 
a police force which itself can not be trusted ? That prolong- 
ed disarmament causes our subjects to forget the art of war 
is scarcely true, and if true would tell both ways. The ques- 
tion is not one of disarmament and suppression of rebellion : 
it is that of whether we can raise up in India a people that 
will support our rule ; and if this is to be done there must be 
an end of cuffing. 

Were the Hindoos as capable of appreciating the best 
points of our government as they are of pointing out the 
worst, we should have nothing to fear in comparison with 
Russia. Drunken, dirty, ignorant, and corrupt, the Russian 
people are no fit rulers for Hindostan. Were our rival that 
which "she pretends to be — a civilized European Power with 
" a mission " in the East ; were she even, indeed, an enlight- 
ened commercial Power, with sufficiently benevolent instincts, 
but witli no policy outside her pocket, such as England was 
till lately in the East, and is still in the Pacific, we might find 
ourselves able to meet her with open arms, and to bring our- 
selves to believe that her advance into Southern Asia was a 
gain to mankind. As it is, the Russians form a barbarous 
horde, ruled by a German emperor and a German ministry, 
who, however, are as little able to suppress degrading drunk- 
enness and shameless venality as they are themselves desirous 
of promoting true enlightenment and education. " Talk .of 
Russian civilization of the East !" an Egyptian once said to 
me ; " why, Russia is an organized barbarism ; why — the Rus- 
sians are — ^why they are — why — ^nearly as bad as we are !" It 
should be remembered, too, that Russia, being herself an 
Asiatic power, can never introduce European civilization into 
Asia. All the cry of " Russia ! Russia !" all this magnifying 
of the Russian power, only means that the English, being the 



EussiA. 483 

' strong men most hated by the weak men of Southern Asia, 
the name of tlie next strongest is used to terrify them. The 
offensive strength of Russia has been grossly exaggerated by 
alarmists, who forget that, if Russia is to be strong in Bo- 
khara and Khiva, it will be Bokharan and Khivan strength. 
In all our arguments we assume that with three-fourths of her 
power in Asia, and with her armies composed of Asians, Rus- 
sia will remain a European Power.- Whatever the composi- 
tion of her forces, it may be doubted whether India is no,t a 
stronger empire than her new neighbor. The military expend- 
iture of India is equal to that of Russia ; the homogeneous- 
ness of the E'orthern Power is at the best inferior to that of 
India ; India has twice the population of Russia, five times 
her trade, and as large a revenue. To the miserable military 
administration of Russia Afghanistan would prove a second 
Caucasus, and by their conduct we see that the Afghans them- 
selves are not terrified by her advance. The people with 
whom an Asiatic prince seeks alliances are not those whom he 
most fears. That the Afghans are continually intriguing with 
Russia against us merely means that they fear us more than 
they fear Russia. 

Russia will one day find herself encountering the English 
or Americans in China, perhaps, but not upon the plains of 
Hindostan. Wherever and whenever the contest comes, it 
can have but one result. Whether upon India or on England 
falls the duty of defense, Russia must be beaten. A country 
that was fifty years conquering the Caucasus, and that could 
never place a disposable force of 60,000 men in the Crimea, 
need give no fear to India, while her grandest offensive efforts 
would be ridiculed by America or by the England of to-day. 
To meet Russia in the way that we are asked to meet her 
means to meet her by corruption, and a system of meddling 
Eastern diplomacy is proposed to us which is revolting to our 
English nature. Let us by all means go our own way, and 
let Russia go hers. If we try to meet the Russian Orientals 
with craft we shall be defeated ; let us meet them, therefore, 
with straightforwardness and friendship, but, if necessary, in 
arms. 

It is not Russia that we need dread; but by the destruc- 
tion of the various nationalities in Hindostan by means of 



484 Greater Britain. 

centralization and of railroads we have created an India which 
we can not fight. India herself, not Russia, is our danger, 
and our task is rather to conciUate than to conquer. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

NATIVE STATES. 

Quitting Lahore at night, I travelled to Moultan by a rail- 
way which has names for its stations such as India can not 
match. Chunga-munga, Wanrasharam, Cheechawutnee, and 
Chunnoo follow one another in that order. During the night, 
when I looked out into the still moonlight, I saw only desert, 
and trains of laden camels pacing noiselessly over the waste 
sands; but in the morning I found that the whole country 
within eye-shot was a howhng wilderness. Moultan, renown- 
ed in warlike histoiy from Alexander's time to ours, stands 
upon the edge of the great sandy tract once known as the 
** Desert of the Indies." In every village bagpipes were play- 
ing through the live-long night. There are many resem- 
blances to the Gaelic races to be found in India ; the Hindoo 
girl's saree is the plaid of the Galway peasantress, or of the 
Trongate fish- wife; many of the hiU-tribes wear the kilt; 
but the Punjaubee pipes are like those of the Italian pfiferari 
rather than those of the Scotch Highlander. 

The great sandy desert which lies between the Indus and 
Rajpootana has, perhaps, a future under British rule. Wher- 
ever snowy mountains are met with in warm countries, yearly 
floods, the product of the thaws, sweep down the rivers that 
take their rise in the glaciers of the chain, and the Indus is 
no exception to the rule. Were the fall less great, the stream 
less swift, Scinde would have been another Cambodia, another 
Egypt. As it is, the fertilizing floods pour through the deep 
river-bed instead of covering the land, and the silt is wasted 
on the Arabian Gulf. !N"o native State with narrow bound- 
aries can deal with the great works required for irrigation 
on the scale that can alone succeed ; but possessing as we do 
the country from the defiles whence the five rivers escape into 
the plains to the sandy bars at which they lose themselves in 
the Indian Seas, we might convert the Punjaub and Scinde 



Native States. 485 

into a garden which should support a happy population of a 
hundred millions, reared under our rule, and the best of bul- 
warks against invasion from the north and west. 

At Umritsui' I had seen those great canals that are com- 
mencing to irrigate and fertilize the vast deserts that stretch 
to Scinde. At JuUundur I had already seen their handiwork 
in the fields of cotton, tobacco, and wheat that blossom in the 
middle of a wilderness ; and if the whole Punjaub and Indus 
Valley can be made what Jullundur is, no outlay can be too 
costly a means to such an end. There can be no reason why, 
with irrigation, the Indus Valley should not become as fertile 
as the Valley of the Nile. 

After admiring in Moultan, on the one hand, the grandeur 
of the citadel which still shows signs of the terrible bombard- 
ment which it suffered at our hands after the murder by the 
Sikhs of Mr. Van Agnew in 1848, and, on the other hand, the 
modesty of the sensitive mimosa, which grows plentifully 
about the city, I set off by railway for Sher Shah, the point at 
which the railway comes to its end upon the banks of the 
united Jhelum and Chenab, two of the rivers of the Punjaub. 
The railway company once built a station on the river-bank 
at Sher Shah, but the same summer, .when the floods came 
down, station and railway alike disappeared into the Indus. 
Embanking the river is impossible, from the cost of the works 
which would be needed; and building wing-dams has been 
tried, with the remarkable effect of sending off the river at 
right angles to the dam to devastate the country opposite. 

The railway has now no station at Sher Shah, but the In- 
dus steamer captains pick out a good place to lie alongside 
the bank, and the rails are so laid as to bring the trains along- 
side the ships. After seeing nothing but flat plains from the 
time of leaving Umritsur, I caught sight from Sher Shah of 
the great Sooleiman chain of the Afghan Mountains, rising in 
black masses through the fiery mist that fills the Indus Valley. 

I had so timed my arrival on board the river-boat that she 
sailed the next morning, and after a day's uneventful steam- 
ing, varied by much running aground, when we anchored in 
the evening we were in the native State of Bhawulpore. 

While we were wandering about the river-shore in the 
evening, I and my two or three European fellow-travellers, 



486 Greater Britain. 

we met a native, with whom one of our number got into con- 
versation. The Englishman had heard that Bhawulpore was 
to be annexed, so he asked the native whether he was a Brit- 
ish subject, to which the answer was to the effect that he did 
not know. " To whom do you pay your taxes ?" " To the 
Government." " Which Government ; the English Govern- 
ment or the Bhawulpore Government ?" His answer was that 
he did not care so long as he had to pay them to somebody, 
and that he certainly did not know. 

Little as our Bhawulpore friend knew or cared about the 
color of his rulers, he- was nevertheless, according to our Indian 
Government theories, one of the people who ought to be most 
anxious for the advent of English rule. Such has been the 
insecurity of life in Bhawulpore that of the six last viziers 
five have been murdered by order of the khan, the last of all 
having been strangled in 1862 ; and no native State has been 
more notorious than Bhawulpore for the extravagance and 
gross licentiousness of the reigning princes. The rulers of 
Bhawulpore, although nominally controlled by us, have hither- 
to been absolute despots, and have- frequently put to death 
their subjects out of mere whimsy. For years the country 
has been torn by ceaseless revolutions, to the ruin of the 
traders and the demoralization of the* people ; the taxes have 
been excessive, peculation universal, and the army has lived 
at free quarters. The khans were for many years in such 
dread of attempts upon their lives that every dish for their 
table was tasted by the cooks ; the army vras mutinous, all 
appointments bought and sold, and the khans being Moham- 
medans, no one need pay a debt to a Hindoo. 

Bhawulpore is no exceptional case; everywhere we hear 
of similar deeds being common in native States. One of the 
native rulers lately shot a man for killing a tiger that the rajah 
had wounded ; another flogged a subject for defending his 
wife; abduction, adultery, and sale of wives are common 
among them. Land is seized from its holders without com- 
pensation being so much as offered to them ; extortion, tor- 
ture, and denial of justice are common, open venality prevails 
in all ranks, and no native will take the pledged word of his 
king, while the revenues, largely made up of forced loans, are 
wasted on all that is most vile. 



Native States. 487 

In a vast number of cases the reigning families have de- 
generated to such an extent that the sceptre has come into 
the hands of some mere driveller, whom, for the senselessness 
of his rule, it has at last been necessary to depose. Those 
who have made idiocy their study know that in the majority 
of cases the infirmity is the last stage of the declension of a 
race worn out by hereditary perpetuation of luxury, vice, or 
disease the effect of vice. Every ruling family in the East, 
save such as slave marriages have re-invigorated, is one of 
these run-down and exhausted breeds. Not only unbounded 
tyranny and extortion, but incredible venality and corruption, 
prevail in the greater number of native States. The Rajah 
of Travancore, as it is said, lately requiring some small bunga- 
low to be added to a palace, a builder contracted to build it 
for 10,000 rs. After a time, he came to apply to be let off, 
and on the rajah asking him the reason, he said, " Your high- 
ness, of the 10,000 rs., your prime minister will get 5000 rs., 
his secretary 1000 rs., the baboos in his office another 2000 rs., 
the ladies of the zenana 1000 rs., and the commander of your 
forces 500 rs. ; now the bungalow itself will cost 500 rs., so 
where am I to make my profit ?" Corruption, however, per- 
vades in India all native institutions ; it is not enough to show 
that native States are subject to it unless we can prove that 
it is worse there than in our own dominions. 

The question whether British or native rule be the least 
distasteful to the people of India is one upon which it is not 
easy to decide. It is not to be expected that our Government 
should be popular with the Rajpoot chiefs or with the great 
nobles of Oude, but it may fairly be contended that the mass 
of the people live in more comfort, and, in spite of the Orissa 
case, are less likely to starve, in English than in native terri- 
tory. No nation has at any time ever governed an alien em- 
pire more wisely or justly than we the Punjaub. The men 
who cry out against our rule are the nobles and the schemers, 
who, under it, are left without a hope. Our levelling rule 
does not even, like other democracies, raise up a military chief- 
tainship. Our native officers of the highest rank are paid and 
treated much as are European sergeants, though in native 
States they would of course be generals and princes. 

Want of promotion for sepoys and educated native civilians, 



488 Greater Britain. 

and the degrading treatment of the high-caste people by the 
English, were causes, among others, of the mutiny. The treat- 
ment of the natives can not easily be reformed ; if we punish 
or discourage such behavior in our officers, we can not easily 
reach the European planters and the railway officials, while 
punishment itself would only make men treat the natives with 
violence instead of mere disdain when out of sight of their 
superiors. There is, however, reason to believe that in many 
districts the people are not only well off under our Govern- 
ment, but that they know it. During the native rule in Oude 
the population was diminished by a continual outpour of fu- 
gitives. The British district of Mirzapore Chowhare, on the 
Oude frontiers, had a rural population of over 1000 to each 
square mile — a density entirely owing to the emigration of 
the natives from their villages in Oude. Again, British Bur- 
mah is draining of her people Upper Burmah, which remains 
under the old rulers ; and throughout India the eye can distin- 
guish British territories from the native States by the look of 
prosperity which is borne by all our villages. 

The native merchants and towns-folk generally are our 
friends. It is unfortunately the fact, however, that the culti- 
vators of the soil, who form three-fourths of the population 
of India, believe themselves worse off under us than in the 
native States. They say that they care not who rules so long 
as their holdings are secured to them at a fixed rent, whereas 
under our system the zemindars pay us a fixed rent, but in 
many districts exact what they please from the competing 
peasants — a practice which, under the native system, was pre- 
vented by custom. In all our future land settlements it is to 
be hoped that the agreement will be made, not with middle- 
men, but directly with the people. 

It is not difficult to lay down certain rules for our future 
behavior toward the native States. We already exercise over 
the whole of them a control sufficient to secure ourselves 
against attack in time of peace, but not sufficient to reHeve us 
from all fear of hostile action in time of internal revolt or ex- 
ternal war. It might be well that we should issue a procla- 
mation declaring that, for the future, we should invariably 
recognize the practice of adoption of children by the native 
rulers, as we have done in the case of the Mysore succession ; 



Native States. 489 

but that, on the other hand, we should require the gradual 
disbandment of all troops not needed for the preservation of 
internal peace. We might well commence our action in this 
matter by calling upon the native rulers to bind themselves 
by treaty no longer to keep on foot artillery. In the event of 
an invasion of Hindostan a large portion of our European 
force would be needed to overawe the native princes, and 
prevent their marching upon our rear. It is impossible to be- 
lieve that the native States would ever be of assistance to us 
except in cases where we could do without their help. Dur- 
ing the mutiny the ]!!^epaulese delayed their promised march 
to join us until they were certain that we should beat the 
mutineers, and this although the N^epaulese are among our 
surest friends. After the mutiny it came to hght that Luck- 
now and Delhi — then native capitals — had been centres of 
intrigue, although we had " Residents " at each, and it is prob- 
able that Hyderabad and Cashmere city are little less danger- 
ous to us now than was Delhi in 1857. 

There is one native State, that of Cashmere and Jummoo, 
which stands upon a very different footing to the rest. Cre- 
ated by us as late as 1846 — when we sold this best of all the 
provinces conquered by us from the Maharajahs of Lahore to 
a Sikh traitor, Gholab Singh, an ex-farmer of taxes, for three- 
quarters of a million sterling, which he embezzled from the 
treasury of Lahore — the State of Cashmere has been steadily 
misgoverned for twenty years. Although our tributary, the 
Maharajah of Cashmere forbids English travellers to enter his 
dominions without leave (which is granted only to a fixed 
number of persons every year), to employ more than a stated 
number of servants, to travel except by certain passes for fear 
of their meeting his wives, to buy provisions except of certain 
persons, or to remain in the country after the 1st November 
under any circumstances whatever. He imprisons all native 
Christians, prohibits the exportation of grain whenever there 
is a scarcity in our territory, and takes every opportunity that 
falls in his way of insulting our Government and its officials. 
Our Central Asian trade has been all but entirely destroyed 
by the duties levied by his officers, and Russia is the Mahara- 
jah's chosen friend. The unhappy people of the Cashmere 
Valley, sold by us without their consent or knowledge, to a 

X 2 



490 Greater Britain. 

family which has never ceased to oppress them, petition us 
continually for relief, and, by flocking into our Punjaub terri- 
tory, give practical' testimony to the wrongs they suffer. 

In this case of Cashmere there is ample ground for imme- 
diate repurchase or annexation, if annexation it can be called 
to remove or buy out a feudatory family which was unjustly 
raised to power by us twenty-two years ago, and w^hich has 
broken every article of the agreement under which it was 
placed upon the tributary throne. The only reason which has 
ever been shown against the resumption by us of the govern- 
ment of the Cashmere Valley is the strange argument that, by 
placing it in the hands of a feudatory, we save the expense 
of defending the frontier against the dangerous hill-tribes ; 
although the revenues of the province, even were taxation 
much reduced, would amply suffice to meet the cost of con- 
tinual war, and although our experience in Central India has 
shown that many hill-tribes which will not submit to Hindoo 
rajahs become peaceable at once upon our annexation of their 
country. "Were Cashmere independent and in the hands of 
its old rulers, there would be ample ground for its annexation 
in the prohibition of trade, the hinderance to the civilization 
of Central Asia, the gross oppression of the people, the exist- 
ence of slavery, and the imprisonment of Christians ; as it is, 
the non-annexation of the country almost amounts to a crime 
against mankind. 

Although the necessity of consolidation of our empire and 
the progressive character of our rule are reasons for annexing 
the whole of the native States, there are other and stronger 
arguments in favor of leaving them as they are; our policy 
toward the Nizam must be regulated by the consideration 
that he is now the head of the Moslem power in India, and 
that his influence over the Indian Mohammedans may be made 
useful to us in our dealings with that dangerous portion of 
our people. Our military arrangements with the Nizam are, 
moreover, on the best of footings. Scindia is our fi-iend, and 
no bad ruler, but some interference may be needed with the 
Guicodar of Baroda and with Holkar. Our policy toward 
Mysore is now declared, and consists in the respecting the na- 
tive rule if the young prince proves himself capable of good 
government, and we might impose similar conditions upon 



i 

Native States. 491 

the remaining princes, and also suppress forced labor in their 
States as we have all but suppressed suttee. 

In dealing with the native princes it is advisable that we 
should remember that we are no interlopers of to-day coming 
in to disturb families that have been for ages the rulers of the 
land. Many of the greatest of the native families were set up 
by ourselves ; and of the remainder few, if any, have been in 
possession of their countries so long as have the English of 
Madras or Bombay. 

The Guicodars of Baroda and the family of Holkar are de- 
scended from cowherds, and that of Scindia from a peasant, 
and none of them date back much more than a hundred years. 
The family of the .Nabobs of Arcot, founded by an adven- 
turer, is not more ancient, neither is that of Nizam : the great 
Hyder Ali was the son of a police constable, and was unable 
to read or write. While we should suspiciously adhere to 
the treaties that we have made, we are bound, in the interests 
of humanity, to intervene in aU cases where it is certain that 
the mass of the people would prefer our rule, and where they 
are suffering under slavery or gross oppression. 

Holka has permitted us to make a railway across his terri- 
tory, but he levies such enormous duties upon goods in transit 
as to cramp the development of trade in a considerable por- 
tion of our dominions. Now the fact that a happy combina- 
tion of circumstances enabled the cowherd, his ancestor, to 
seize upon a certain piece of territory a hundred years ago 
can have given his descendants no prescriptive right to im- 
pede the civilization of India ; all that we must aim at is to 
so improve our governmental system as to make the natives 
themselves see that our rule means the moral advancement of 
their country. 

The best argument that can be made use of against our 
rule is that its strength and minuteness enfeeble the native 
character. When we annex a State we put an end to promo- 
tion alike in war and learning ; and under our rule, unless it 
change its character, enlightenment must decline in India, 
however much material prosperity may increase. 

Under our present system of exclusion of natives from the 
Indian Civil Service, the more boys we educate the more 
vicious and discontented men we have beneath our rule. 



492 Greater Britain. 

Were we to throw it open to them, under a plan of compe- 
tition which would admit to the service even a small number 
of natives, we should at least obtain a valuable body of friends 
in those admitted, and should make the excluded feel that 
their exclusion was in some measure their own fault. As it 
is, we not only exclude natives from our own service, but even 
to some extent from that of the native States, whose levies 
are often drilled by English officers. The Guicodar of Baro- 
da's service is popular with Englishmen, as it has become a 
custom that when he has a review he presents each of his of- 
ficers with a year's full pay. 

Our plan of shutting out the natives from all share in the 
Government not only makes our rule unpopular, but gives rise 
to the strongest of all the arguments in favor of the retention 
of the existing native States, which is, that they offer a career 
to shrewd and learned natives, who otherwise would spend 
their leisure in devising plots against us. One of the ablest 
men in India, Madhava Rao, now premier of Travancore, was 
born in our territory, and was senior scholar of his year in the 
Madras College. That such men as Madhava Rao and Salar 
Jung should be incapable of finding suitable employment in 
our service is one of the standing reproaches of our rule. 

Could we but throw open our services to the natives, our 
Government might, with advantage to civilization, be extend- 
ed over the whole of the native States ; for whether we are 
ever to leave India or whether we are to remain there till the 
end of time, there can be no doubt but that the course best 
adapted to raise the moral condition of the natives is to mould 
Hindostan into a homogeneous empire sufficiently strong to 
stand by itself against all attacks from without, and internally 
governed by natives, under a gradually weakened control from 
at home. If, after careful trial, we find that we can not edu- 
cate the people to become active supporters of our power, 
then it will be time to make use of the native princes and 
grandees, but it is to be hoped that the people, as they become 
well taught, will also become the main-stay of our democratic 
rule. 

The present attitude of the mass of the people is one of in- 
difference and neutrality, which in itself lends a kind of pas. 
sive strength to our rule. During the mutiny of 185 7 the peo- 



SCINDE, 493 

pie neither aided nor opposed us ; and even had the whole of 
the land-owners been against us, as were those of Oude, it is 
doubtful whether they could have raised their villagers and 
peasants. Were our policemen relatively equal to their offi- 
cers and to the magistrates, we should never hear of native 
disaffection ; but we can not count upon the attachment of the 
people so long as it is possible for our constables to procure 
confessions by the bribery of villagers or the application of 
pots full of wasps to their stomachs. 

In the matter of the annexation of those native States 
which still cumber the earth we are not altogether free agents. 
We swallow up States like Bhawulpore just as Russia con- 
sumes Bokhara. Everywhere indeed in Asia strong countries 
must inevitably swallow up their weaker neighbors. Failure 
of heirs, broken treaties, irregular frontiers — all these are rea- 
sons or assumed reasons for advance ; but the end is certain, 
and is exemplified in the march of England from Calcutta to 
Peshawur, and of Russia from the Aral to Turkestan. Our 
experience in the case of the Punjaub shows that even honest 
discouragement of farther advances on the part of the rulers 
of the stronger power will not always suffice to prevent an- 
nexation. 

CHAPTER XV. 

SCINDE. 

Keae Mithun Kote we steamed suddenly into the main 
stream of the Indus, the bed of which is here a mile and a 
quarter wide. Although the river at the time of my visit was 
rising fast, it was far from being at its greatest height. In 
January it brings down but forty thousand cubic feet of water 
every second, but in August it pours down four hundred and 
fifty thousand. The river-bed is rarely covered with running 
water, but the stream cuts a channel for itself upon one shore, 
and flows in a current of eight or nine miles an hour, while 
the remainder of the bed is filled with half-Hquid sand. 

The navigation of the Indus is monotonous enough. Were 
it not for the climate, the view would resemble that on the 
Maas, near Rotterdam, though with alligators lining the bapks 
instead of logs from the Upper Meuse ; but climate affects 



404 Greater Britain. 

color, and every country has tints of its own. California is 
golden, New Zealand a black-green, Australia yellow, the In- 
dus Valley is of a blazing red. Although every evening the 
Beloochee Mountains came in sight as the sun sank down be- 
hind them, and revealed their shapes in shadow, all through 
the day the landscape was one of endless flats. The river is a 
dirty flood, now swift, now sluggish, running through a coun- 
try in which sand deserts alternate only with fields of stone. 
Villages upon the banks there are none, and from town to 
town is a day's journey at the least. The only life in the 
view is given by an occasional sail of gigantic size and curious 
shape, belonging to some native craft or other on her voyage 
from the Punjaub to Kurrachee. On our journey down the 
Indus we passed hundreds of ships, but met not one. They 
are built of timber, which is plentiful in the Himalayas, upon 
the head-waters of the river, and carry down to the sea the 
produce of the Punjaub. The stream is so strong that the 
ships are broken up in Scinde, and the crews walk back 1000 
miles along the bank. In building his ships upon the Hydas- 
pes, and sailing them down the Indui^ to its mouth, Alexander 
did but follow the custom of the country. The natives, how- 
ever, break up their ships at Kotree, whereas the Macedonian 
intrusted his to N'earchus for the voyage to the Gulf of Persia 
and a survey of the coast. 

Geographically, the Indus Valley is but a portion of the 
Great Sahara. Those who know the desert well say that 
from Cape Blanco to Khartoom, from Khartoom to Muscat, 
from Muscat to Moultan, the desert is but one ; the same in 
the absence of life, the same in such life as it does possess. 
The Valley of the Nile is but an oasis, the Gulfs of Persia 
and of Aden are but trifling breaks in its vast width'. Rain- 
less, swept by dry, hot winds laden with prickly sand, trav- 
ersed everywhere by low ranges of red and sun-burnt rocks, 
strewn with jagged stones, and dotted here and there with a 
patch of dates gathered about some ancient well, such is the 
Sahara for a length of near six thousand miles. On the Indus 
banks the sand is as salt as it is at Suez, and there are as many 
petrified trees between Sukkur and Kurrachee as there are in 
the neighborhood of Cairo. 

Our days on board were all passed upon one plan. Each 



SCINDE. 495 

morning we rose at dawn, which came about half-past four 
and, watching the starting of the ship from the bank where 
she had been moored all night, we got a cool walk in our 
sleeping-clothes before we bathed and dressed. The heat 
then suffocated us quietly till four, when we would re-assert 
the majesty of man by bathing, and attempting to walk or 
talk till dinner, which was at five. At dark we anchored, and 
after watching the water-turtles at their play, or hunting for 
the monstrous water-lizards known as "goss" — apparently 
the ichneumons, called in Egypt " gots " — or sometimes fish- 
ing for great mud-fish with wide mouths and powerful teeth, 
we would resume our sleeping clothes (in which, but for the 
dignity of the Briton in the eyes of the native crew, we should 
have dined and spent the day). At half -past seven or eight 
we lay down on deck, and forgot our sorrows in sleep, or en- 
gaged in a frantic struggle with the cockroaches. In the lat- 
ter conflict we — ^in our dreams at least — were not victorious, 
and once in an awful trance I believed myself carried off by 
one leg in the jaws of a gigantic cockroach, and pushed with 
his feelers down into this horrid hole. 

Each hour passed on the Indus differs from the others only 
in the greater or less portion of it which is devoted to getting 
off the sand-banks. After steaming gallantly down a narrow 
but deep and swift piece of the river we would come to a 
spot at which the flood would lose itself in crossing its bed 
from one bank to the other. Backing the engines, but being 
whirled along close to the steep bank by the remaining por- 
tion of the current, we soon felt a shock, the recoil from 
which upset us, chairs and all, it being noticeable that we al- 
ways fell up stream, and not with our heads in the direction 
in which the ship was going. As soon as we were fairly stuck 
the captain flew at the pilot, and kicked him round the deck 
— a process always borne with fortitude, although the pilot 
was changed every day. The only pilot never kicked was 
one who came on board near Bhawulpore, and who carried a 
jewelled tulwar, or Afghan scimiter, but even he was threat- 
ened. The kicking over, an entry of the time of grounding 
was made by the captain in the pilot's book, and the mate 
was ordered out in a boat to sound, while the native soldiers 
on board the flats we were towing began quietly to cook 



496 Greater Britain. 

their dinner. The mate having found a sort of channel, 
though sometimes it had a ridge across it over which the 
steamer could not pass without touching, he returned for a 
kedge, which he fixed in the sand, and we were soon warped 
up to it by the use of the capstan, the native crew singing 
merrily the while. Every now and then, however, we would 
take the ground in the centre of the ship, and with deep water 
all round, and then, instead of getting off, we for hours to- 
gether only pivoted round and round. One of the Indus 
boats, with a line regiment on board, was once aground for 
a month near Mithun Kote, to the entire destruction of all the 
wild boars in the neighborhood. 

The kicking of the unfortunate pilots was not a pleasant 
sight, but there were sometimes comic incidents attached to 
our periodic groundings. Once I noticed that the five men 
who were constantly sounding with colored poles in different 
parts of the ship and flats had got into a monotonous chorus 
of " panche — e pot " (" fi.ve feet ") — we drawing only three, 
so that we went ahead confidently at full speed, when sudden- 
ly we ran aground with a violent shock. On the re-sounding 
of our course by the boat's crew we found that our pole-men 
must for some time past have been guessing the soundings to 
save the trouble of looking. These fellows richly deserved a 
kicking, but the pilots are innocent of any fault but inability 
to keep pace with the rapid changes of the river-course. 

Another curious scene took placa one day when we were 
steaming down a reach in which the river made many sudden 
twists and turns. We had on board a merchant from the 
Persian Gulf, a devout Mohammedan. In the afternoon he 
carried his praying-carpet on to the bridge between the pad- 
dle-boxes, and there, turning to the west, commenced to pray. 
The sun was on his left, but almost facing him ; in an instant 
round whirled the ship, making her course between two sand- 
bars, and Mecca and the sun into the bargain were right 
behind our worshiper. This was too much even for his devo- 
tion, so, glancing at the new course, he turned his carpet, and, 
looking in a fresh direction, recommenced his prayers. After 
a minute or two back went the sJdip, and we began again to 
steer a southerly course. All this time the Persian kept his 
look of complete abstraction, and r,emained unshaken through 



SCINDE. 497 

all Ms difficulties. This seriousness in face of events which 
would force into shouts of laughter any European congrega- 
tion is a characteristic of a native. It is strange that English- 
men are nowhere so easily provoked to loud laughter as in a 
church or college chapel, natives at no time so insusceptible 
of ridicule as when engaged upon the services of their re- 
ligions. 

The shallowness of the Indus, its impracticability for steam- 
ships during some months of the year, and the many windings 
of the stream — all these things make it improbable that the 
river will ever be largely available for purposes of trade ; at 
the same time the Indus Yalley must necessarily be the line 
taken by the commerce of the Punjaub, and eventually by that 
of some portions of Central Asia, and even of Southern China. 
Whether Kurrachee becomes our great Indian port, or whether 
our railway be made through Beloochistan, a safe and speedy 
road up the Indus Valley for troops and trade is needed. 

If we take into consideration the size of India, the amount 
of its revenues, and the length of time during which we have 
occupied that portion of its extent which we at present hold, 
it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that not even in Aus- 
tralia have railways been more completely neglected than they 
have been in India. We have opened but 4000 miles, or one 
mile for every 45,000 people. !N'othing has been touched as 
yet but the Grand Trunk and great military and postal routes, 
and even these are little more than half completed. Even the 
Bombay and Calcutta mail line and the Calcutta and Lahore 
lines are hardly finished ; the Peshawui line* and the Indus 
road not yet begun. While at home people believe tliat the 
Euphrates Valley Railway is under consideration, they will 
find, if they come out to India, that to reach Peshawur, in 34° 
N. latitude, they must go to Bombay, in 18°, if not to Galle, in 
6°. Even if they reach Kurrachee, they will find it a month's 
journey to Peshawur. While we are trying to tempt the 
wool and shawls of Central Asia down to Umritsur and La- 
hore, the goods with which we would buy these things aro 
sent round by the Cape of Good Hope and Calcutta, 

It is true that the Indus line will be no easy one to make. 
To bridge the river at Mithun Kote or even at Kotreo would 
be diflScult enough ; and were it to be bridged at Sukkur, whero 



498 Greater Britain. 

there is rock, and a narrow pass upon the river, the line from 
Sukkur to Kurrachee would be exposed to depredation from 
the frontier tribes. The difficulties are great, but the need 
is greater, and the argument of the heavy cost of river-side 
railroads should not weigh with us in the case of lines required 
for the safety of the country. The Lahore and Peshawur, the 
Kotree and Moultan, the Kotree and Baroda, and the Baroda 
and Delhi lines, instead of being set one against the other for 
comparison, should be simultaneously completed as necessary 
for the defense of the empire, and as forming the trunk-lines 
for innumerable branches int^ the cotton and wheat-growing 
districts. 

One of the branches of the Indus line will have to be con- 
structed from the Bholan Pass to Sukkur, where we lay some 
days embarking cotton. Sukkur lies on the Beloochistan 
side ; Roree fort — ^known as the " Key of Scinde," the seizure 
of which by us provoked the great war with the Ameers — on 
an island in mid-stream ; and Bukkur city on the eastern or 
left bank ; and the river, here narrowed to a width of a quar- 
ter of a mile, runs with the violence of a mountain torrent. 

Sukkur is one of the most ancient, of Indian cities, and was 
mentioned as time-worn by the Greek geographers, while tra- 
dition, says that its antiquities attracted Alexander ; but towns 
grow old with great rapidity in India, and, once ancient in 
their look, never to the eye become in the slightest degree 
older. 

In Sukkur I first saw the Scindee cap, which may be de- 
scribed as a tall hat with the brim atop, but the Scindees were 
not the only strangely-dressed traders in Sukkur and Roree : 
there were high-capped Persians, and lean Afghans, with long 
gaunt faces and high cheek-bones, and furred merchants fi*om 
Central Asia. It is even said that goods find their way over- 
land from China to Sukkur, through Eastern Persia and Be- 
loochistan, the traders preferring to come round four thousand 
miles than to cross the main chain of the Himalayas or pass 
through the country of the Afghans. 

In ancient times there was considerable intercourse between 
China and Hindostan ; at the end of the seventh century, in- 
deed, the Chinese invaded India through Nepaul, and captured 
five hundred cities. It is to be hoped that the next few years 



SCINDE. 499 

may see a railway built from. Rangoon to Southern China, and 
from Calcutta to the Yang-tse-Kiang, a river upon which there 
are ample stores of coal, which would supply the* manufactur- 
ing wants of India. 

After viewing from a lofty tower the flat country in the 
direction of Shikapore, we spent one of our Sukkur evenings 
upon the Island of Roree watching the natives fishing. Cast- 
ing themselves into the river on the top of skins full of air, 
or more commonly on great earthenware pitchers, they floated 
at a rapid pace down with the whirling stream, pushing be- 
fore them a sunken net which they could close and lift by the 
drawing of a string. About twice a minute they would strike 
a fish, and, lifting their head, would impale the captive on a 
stick slung behind their back, and at once lower again the net 
in readiness for fur.ther action. 

Sukkur, like seven other places that I had visited within a 
year, has the reputation of being the hottest city in the world, 
and the joke on the boats of the Indus flotilla is that Moul- 
tan is too hot to bear, and Sukkur much hotter, but that Jaco- 
babad, on the Beloochee frontier, near Sukkur, is so hot that 
the people come down thence to Sukkur for the hot season, 
and find its coolness as refreshing as ordinary mortals do that 
of Simla. Hot as is Sukkur, it is fairly beaten by a spot at 
the foot of the Ibex Hills, near Sehwan. I was sleeping on the 
bridge with an officer from Peshawur when the crew were 
preparing to put off from the bank for the day's journey. We 
were awakened by the noise ; but as we sat up and rubbed 
our eyes, a blast of hot wind came down from the burnt-up 
hills, laden with fine sand, and of such a character that I got 
a lantern — ^f or it was not fully light — and made my way to 
the deck thermometer. I found it standing at 104°, although 
the hour was 4.15 a.m. At breakfast-time it had fallen to 100°, 
from which it slowly rose, until at 1 p.ir. it registered 116° in 
the shade. The next night it never fell below 100°. This 
was the highest temperature I experienced in India during 
the hot weather, and it was, singularly enough, the same as 
the highest which I recorded in Australia. ISTo part of the 
course of the Indus is within the tropics, but it is not in the 
tropics that the days are hottest, although the nights are 
generally unbearable on sea-level near the equator. 



500 GrREATEB BRITAIN. 

At Kootree, near Hydrabad, the capital of Scinde, where 
the tombs of the Ameers are imposing if far from beautiful, 
we left the Indus for the railway, and after a night's journey 
found ourselves upon the sea-shore at Kurrachee. 



CHAPTER XVI. 

OVERLAND ROUTES. 

Op all the towns in India Kurrachee is the least Indian. 
With its strong south-westerly breeze, its open sea and danc- 
ing waves, it is to one coming from the Indus Valley a pleas- 
ant place enough ; and the climate is as good as that of Alex- 
andria, though there is at Kurrachee all the dust of Cairo. 
For a stranger detained against his will to find Kurrachee 
bearable there must be something refreshing in its breezes : 
the town stands on a treeless plain, and of sights there are 
none, unless it be the sacred alligators at Muggur Peer, where 
the tame " man-eaters " spring at a goat for the visitor's 
amusement as freely as the Wolfsbrunnen trout jump at the 
gudgeon. 

There is no reason given why the alligators' pool should 
be reputed holy, but in India places easily acquire sacred 
fame. About Peshawur there dwell many hill-fanatics, whose 
solp religion appears to consist in stalking British sentries. 
So many of them have been locked up in the Peshawur jail 
that it has become a holy place, and men are said to steal and 
riot in the streets of the bazar in order that they may be con- 
signed to this sacred temple. 

The nights were noisy in Kurrachee, for the great Mo- 
hammedan feast of the Mohurrum had commenced, and my 
bungalow was close to the lines of the police, who are mostly 
Belooch Mohammedans. Every evening at dusk fires were 
lighted in the police-lines and the bazar, and then the tom- 
toming gradually increased from the gentle drone of the day- 
time until a perfect storm of " tom-a-tom, tomtom, tom-a-tom, 
tomtom," burst from all quarters of the town, and continued 
the whole night long, relieved only by blasts from conch-shells 
and shouts of " Shah Hassan ! Shah Hoosein ! Wah Allah ! 
Wah Allah !" as the performers danced round the flames. I 



502 Greater Britain. 

heartily wished myself in the State of Bhawulpore, where 
there is a license-tax on the beating of drums at feasts. The 
first night of the festival I called up a native servant who 
" spoke English " to make him take me to the fires and ex- 
plain the matter. His only explanation was a continual rep- 
etition of "Dat Mohurrum, Mohammedan Christmas Day." 
When each night, about dawn, the tomtoming died away 
once more, the chokedars — or night watchmen — woke up from 
their sound sleep, and began to shout " Ha ha V into every 
room to show that they were awake. 

The chokedars are well-known characters in every Indian 
station : always either sleepy and useless, or else in league 
with the thieves, they are nevertheless a recognized class, 
and are everywhere employed. At Rawul-pindee and Pe- 
shawur the chokedars are armed with guns, and it is said that 
a newly-arrived English officer at the former place was lately 
returning from a dinner-party when he was challenged by the 
chokedar of the first house he had to pass. Not knowing 
what reply to make, he took to his heels, when the chokedar 
fired at him as he ran. The shot woke all the chokedars of 
the parade, and the unfortunate officer received the fire of 
every man as he passed along to his house at the farther end 
of the lines, which he reached, however, in perfect safety. It 
has been suggested that, for the purpose of excluding all na- 
tives from the lines at night, there should be a shibboleth or 
standing parole of some word which no native can pronounce. 
The word suggested is " Shoeburyness." 

Although chokedars were silent and tomtoming subdued 
during the day-time, there were plenty of other sounds. Liz- 
ards chiri^ed from the walls of my room, and sparrows twit- 
tered from every beam and rafter of the roof. When I told 
a Kurrachee friend that my slippers, my brushes, and sol- 
dier's writing-case had all been thrown by me on to the chief 
beam during an unsuccessful attempt to dislodge the enemy, 
he replied that for his part he paraded his drawing-room ev- 
ery morning with a double-barrelled gun, and frequently fired 
into the rafters, to the horror of his wife. 

In a small lateen-rigged yacht lent us by a fellow-traveller 
from Moultan some of us visited the works which have long 
been in progress for the improvement of the harbor of Kur- 



Overland Routes. 503 

rachee, and which form the sole topic of conversation among 
the residents in the town. The works have for object the re- 
moval of the bar which obstructs the entrance to the harbor, 
with a view to permit the entry of larger shij)s than can at 
present find an anchorage at Kurrachee. 

The most serious question under discussion is that of 
whether the bar is formed by the Indus silt or merely by loi- 
cal causes, as, if the former supposition is correct, the ultimate 
disposition of the ten thousand millions of cubic feet of mud 
which the Indus annually brings down is not likely to be af- 
fected by such works as those in progress at Kurrachee. 
When a thousand sealed bottles were lately thrown into the 
Indus for it to be seen whether they would reach the bar, the 
result of the " great bottle trick," as Kurrachee people called 
it, was that only one bottle reached and not one weathered a 
point six miles to the southward of the harbor. The bar is 
improving every year, and has now some tAventy feet of water, 
so that ships of 1000 tons can enter except in the monsoon, 
and the general belief of engineers is that the completion of 
the present works will materially increase the depth of wa- 
ter. 

The question of this bar is not one of merely local interest : 
a single glance at the map is sufficient to show the importance 
of Kurrachee. Already rising at an unprecedented pace, hav- 
ing trebled her shipping and quadrupled her trade in ten years, 
she is destined to make still greater strides as soon as the In- 
dus Railway is completed; and finally — when the Persian 
Gulf route becomes a fact— to be the greatest of the ports of 
India. 

That a railway must one day be completed from Constan- 
tinople or from some port on the Mediterranean to Bussorah 
on the Persian Gulf is a point which scarcely admits of doubt. 
From Kurrachee or Bombay to London by the Euphrates 
Valley and Constantinople is all but a straight line, while from 
Bombay to London by Aden and Alexandria is a wasteful 
curve. . The so-called " Overland Route " is half as long again 
as would be the direct line. The Red Sea and Isthmus route 
has neither the advantage of unbroken sea nor of unbroken land 
transit; the direct route with a bridge near Constantinople 
might be extended into a land road from India to Calais or 



604 Greater Britain. - <^^„. 

Rotterdam. The Red Sea line passes along the shores of Ara- 
bia, where there is comparatively little local trade ; the Persian 
Gulf route would develop the remarkable wealth of Persia, and 
would carry to Europe a local commerce already great. At the 
entrance of the Persian Gulf, near Cape Mussendoom or Or- 
muz, we should establish a fi'ee port on the plan of Singapore. 
hi 1000 A.D. the spot now known as Ormuz was a barren rock, 
but a few years of permanent occupation of the spot as a free 
port changed the barren islet into one of the wealthiest cities 
in the world. The Red Sea route crosses Egypt, the direct 
route crosses Turkey ; and it can not be too strongly urged 
that in war-time " Egypt " means Russia or France, wliile 
" Turkey " means Great Britain. 

In any scheme of a Constantinople and Gulf railroad Kur- 
rachee would play a leading part. Not only the wheat and 
the cotton of the Punjaub and of the then irrigated Scinde, 
but the trade of Central Asia, would flow down the Indus, and 
it is hardly too much to beheve that the silks of China, the 
teas of Northern India, and the shawls of Cashmere will all 
of them one day find in Kurrachee their chief port. The 
earhest known overland route was that by the Persian Gulf. 
Chinese ships traded to Ormuz in the fifth and seventh cen- 
turies, bringing silk and iron, and it may be doubted whether 
any of the Russian routes will be able to compete with the 
more ancient Euphrates Valley line of trade. Shorter, pass- 
ing through countries well known and comj)aratively civilized, 
admitting at once of the use of land and water transport side 
by side, it is far superior in commercial and political advan- 
tages to any of the Russian desert roads. A route through 
Upper Persia has been proposed, but merchants of experience 
will tell you that greater facilities for trade are extended to 
Europeans in even the " closed " ports of China than upon 
the coasts of Persia, and the prospect of the freedom of trade 
upon a Persian railroad would be but a bad one, it may be 
feared. 

The return of trade to the Gulf route will revive the glory 
of many fallen cities of the Middle Ages. Ormuz and Anti- 
och, Cyprus and Rhodes, have a second history before them ; 
Crete, Brindisi, and Venice will each obtain a renewal of their 
ancient fame. Alexander of Macedon was the first man who 



Overland Eoutes. 505 

took a scientific view of the importance of the Gulf route, but 
we have hitherto drawn but little profit from the lesson con- 
tained in his commission to Nearchus to survey the coast from 
the Indus to the Euphrates. The advantage to be gained 
from the completion of the railway from Constantinople to 
the Persian Gulf will not fall only to the share of India and 
Great Britain. Holland and Belgium are, in proportion to 
their wealth, at least as greatly interested in the Euphrates 
route as are we ourselves, and should join us in its construc- 
tion. The Dutch trade with Java would be largely benefited, 
and Dutch ports vrould become the shipping-places for East- 
ern merchandise on its way to England and ISTorth-ea-stern 
America, while to the cheap manufactures of Liege, India, 
China, and Central Asia would afford the best of markets. 
If the line were a double one to the west and north of Aleppo, 
one branch running to Constantinople and the other to the 
Mediterranean at Scanderoon, the whole of Europe w^ould ben- 
efit by the Persian trade, and, in gaining the Persian trade, 
would gain also the power of protecting Persia against Russia, 
and of thus preventing the dominance of a crushing despotism 
throughout the Eastern world. In a thousand ways, however, 
the advantages of the line to all Europe are so plainly mani- 
fest that the only question worth discussing is the nature of 
the difficulties that hinder its completion. 

The difficulties in the way of the Gulf route are political 
and financial, and both have been exaggerated without limit. 
The project for a railway from Constantinople to the Persian 
Gulf has been compared to that for the construction of a rail- 
road from the Missouri to the Pacific. In 1858 the American 
line was looked on as a mere speculator's dream, while the 
Euphrates Railway was to be commenced at once : ten years 
have passed, and the Pacific Railway is a fact, while the Indian 
line has been forgotten. 

It is not that the making of the Euphrates line is a more 
difficult matter than that of crossing the Plains and Rocky 
Mountains. The distance from St. Louis to San Francisco is 
1600 miles, and that from Constantinople to Bussorah is but 
1100 miles; or from Scanderoon to Bussorah only TOO miles. 
From London to the Persian Gulf is not so far as from ISTew 
York to San Francisco. The American line had to cross two 

Y 



506 Greater Britain. 

great snowy chains and a waterless tract of considerable 
width : the Indian route crosses no passes so lofty as those of 
the Rocky Mountains or so difficult as those of the Sierra Neva- 
da, and is well watered in its whole length. On the American 
line there is little coal, if any, while the Euphrates route would 
be plentifully supplied with coal from the neighborhood of 
Bagdad. When the American line was commenced the pro- 
posed track lay across unknown wilds : the Constantinople 
and Persian Gulf route passes through venerable towns, the 
most ancient of all the cities of the world, and the route it- 
self is the oldest known highway of trade. The chief of all 
the advantages possessed by the Indian line which is wanting 
in America is the presence of ample labor on all parts of the 
road. Steamers are already rmming from Bombay and Kur- 
rachee to the Persian Gulf ; others on the Tigris and a por- 
tion of the Euphrates ; there is a much-used road from Bag- 
dad to Aleppo, and a Turkish military road from Aleppo to 
Constantinople, to which^ city a direct railroad will soon be 
opened ; and a telegraph line belonging to an English com- 
pany already crosses Asian Turkey from end to end. Not- 
withstanding the facilities, the Euphrates Railway is still a 
project, while the Atlantic and Pacific line will be opened in 
1810. 

Were the financial difficulties those which the suj)j)orters 
of the line have in reality to meet, it might be urged that 
there will be a great local traffic between Bussorah, Bagdad, 
and Aleppo, and from all these cities to the sea, and that the 
Government mail subsidies will be huge, and the Indian trade, 
even in the worst of years, considerable. Were the indiffer- 
ence of Belgium, Germany, and Holland such that they should 
refuse to contribute toward the cost of the line, its importance 
would amply warrant a moderate addition to the debt of India. 

The real difficulties that have to be encountered are polit- 
ical rather than financial ; the covert opposition of France and 
Egypt is not less powerful for evil than is the open hostility 
of Russia. Happily for India, however, the territories of our 
ally Turkey extend to the Persian Gulf, for it must be remem- 
bered that for railway purposes Turkish rule, if Ave so please, 
is equivalent to English rule. As it happens, no active meas- 
ures are needed to advance our line, but were it otherwise. 



Overland Koutes. 507 

such intervention as might be necessary to secure the safety 
of the great highway for Eastern trade with Europe would 
be defensible were it exerted toward a purely independent 
Government. 

The pressure to be put upon the Ottoman Porte must be 
direct and governmental. For a private company to conduct 
a great enterprise to a successful conclusion in Eastern coun-^ 
tries is always difficult ; but when the matter is political in 
its nature, or, if commercial, at least hindered on political 
grounds, a private company is powerless. It is, moreover, the 
]3ractice of Eastern Governments to grant concessions of im- 
portant works which they can not openly oppose, but which in 
truth they wish to hinder, to companies so formed as to be 
incapable of proceeding with the undertaking. When others 
apply, the Government answers them that nothing further can 
be done : " the concession is already granted." 

Whatever steps are taken, a bold front is needed. It might 
even be advisable that we should declare that the Euphrates 
Valley railway through the Turkish territory from Constan- 
tinople and Scanderoon through Aleppo to Bagdad and Bus- 
sorah, and sufficient military posts to insure its security in 
time of war, are necessary to our tenure of India, and that we 
should call upon Turkey to grant us permission to commence 
our work on pain of the withdrawal of our protection. 

Our general principle of non-interference is always liable to 
be set aside on proof of the existence of a higher necessity for 
intervention than for adherence to our golden rule, and it may 
be contended that sufficient proof has been shown in the pres- 
ent instance. Whether public action is to be taken, or the 
matter to be left to private enterprise, it is hard to resist the 
conclusion that the direct route to India is one of the most 
pressing of the questions of the day. 

When, in company with my fellow-passengers from Moul- 
tan, I left Kurrachee for Bombay, we had on board the then 
Commissioner of Scinde, who was on his way to take his seat 
as a member of Council at Bombay. A number of the lead- 
ing men of Scinde came on board to bid farewell to him be- 
fore he sailed, and among them the royal brothers who, but 
for our annexation of the country, would be the reigning 
Ameers at this moment. 



508 Greater Britain. 

Nothing that I had seen in India, even at Umritsur, sur- 
passed in glittering pomp the caps and baldricks of these Scin- 
dee chieftains ; neither could any thing be stranger than their 
dress. One had on a silk coat of pale green shot with yellow, 
satin trowsers, and velvet slippers with curled peaks ; another 
wore a jacket of dark amber with flowers in white lace. A 
i|hird was clothed in a cloth of crimson striped with amber ; 
and the Ameer himself was wearing a tunic of scarlet silk and 
gold and a scarf of purple gauze. All wore the strange-shaped 
Scindian hat; all had jewelled dirks, with curiously-wrought 
scabbards to hold their swords, and gorgeously-embroidered 
baldricks to support them. The sight, however, of no number 
of sapphires, turquoises, and gold clothes could have recon- 
ciled me to a longer detention in Kurrachee; so I rejoiced 
when our bespangled friends disappeared over the ship's side 
to the sound of the Lascars' anchor-tripping chorus, and left 
the deck to the " proconsul." and ourselves. 



CHAPTER XYII. 

BOMBAY. 



Crossing the mouths of the Gulfs of Cutch and Cambay, 
we reached Bombay in little more than two days from Kur- 
rachee ; but as we rounded Colaba Point and entered the har- 
bor the setting sun was lighting up the distant ranges of the 
Western Ghauts, and by the time we had dropped anchor it 
was dark, so I slept on board. 

I woke to find the day breaking over the peaked mount- 
ains of the Deccan, and revealing the wooded summits of the 
islands, while a light land-breeze rippled the surface of the 
water, and the bay was alive with the bright lateen sails of 
the native cotton-boats. The many woods coming down in 
rich green masses into the sea itself lent a singular softness 
to the view, and the harbor echoed with the capstan-songs of 
all nations, from the American to the Beloochee, from the 
Swedish to the Greek. 

The vegetation that surrounds the harbor, though the even 
mass of green is broken here and there by the crimson cones 
of the " gold mohur " trees, resembles that of Ceylon, and the 



Bombay. 609 

scene is rather tropical than Indian, but there is nothing trop- 
ical and little that is Eastern in the bustle of the bajo The 
lines of huge' steamers, and forests of masts backed by the 
still more crowded field of roofs and towers, impress you with 
a sense of wealth and worldliness from which you gladly seek 
relief by turning toward the misty beauty of the mountain 
islands and the Western Ghauts. Were the harbor smaller 
it would be lovely ; as it is, the distances are over-great. 

Notwithstanding its vast trade, Bombay for purposes of 
defense is singularly weak. The absence of batteries from 
the entrance to so great a trading-port strikes eyes that have 
seen San Francisco and 'New York, and the marks on the sea- 
wall of Bombay Castle of the cannon-balls of the African ad- 
mii-als of the Mogul should be a warning to the Bombay mer- 
chants to fortify their port agaitist attacks by sea, but act as 
a reminder to the traveller that, from a military point of view,* 
Kurrachee is a better harbor than Bombay, the approach to 
which can easily be cut off, and its people starved. One ad- 
vantage, however, of the erection of batteries at the harbor's 
mouth would be, that the present fort might be pulled down, 
unless it were thought advisable to retain it for the protection 
of the Europeans against riots, and that in any case the broad 
space of cleared ground which now cuts the town in half 
might be partly built on. 

The present remarkable prosperity of Bombay is the result 
of the late increase in the cotton-trade, to the sudden decline 
of which, in 1865 and 1866, has also been attributed the ruin 
that fell upon the city in the last-named year. The panic, 
from which Bombay has now so far recovered that it can no 
longer be said that she has " not oft^ merchant solvent," was 
chiefly a reaction from a speculation-madness, in which the 
shares in a land reclamation company which never commenced 
its operations once touched a thousand per cent., but was in- 
tensified by the passage of the English panic-wave of 1866 
across India and round the world. 

Not even in MississijDpi is cotton more completely king 
than in Bombay. Cotton has collected the hundred steamers 
and the thousands of native boats that are anchored between 
the Apollo Bunder and Mazagon ; cotton has built the great 
pffices and stores of seven and eight stories high ; cotton has 



510 Greater Britain. - 

furnished the villas on Malabar Hill, that resemble the New 
Yorkers' cottages on Staten Island. 

The export of cotton from India rose from five millions' 
worth in 1859 to thirty-eight millions' worth in 1864, and the 
total exports of Bombay increased in the same proportion, 
while the population of the city rose fi'om 400,000 to 1,000,000. 
We are accustomed to look at the East as standing still, but 
Chicago itself never took a grander leap than did Bombay 
between 1860 and 1864. The rebellion in America gave the 
impetus, but was not the sole cause of this prosperity ; and 
the Indian cotton-trade, though checked by the peace, is not 
destroyed. Cotton and jute are not the only Indian raw prod- 
ucts the export of which has increased suddenly of late. The 
export of wool increased twentyfold, of tobacco threefold, 
of coffee sevenfold in the Ijist six years ; and the export of 
Indian tea increased in five years from nothing to three or 
four hundred thousand j^ounds. The old Indian exports, 
those which we associate with the term " Eastern trade," are 
standing still, while the raw produce trade is thus increasing : 
spices, elephants' teeth, pearls, jewels, bandanas, shellac, dates, 
and gum are all decreasing, although the total exports of the 
country have trebled in five years. 

India needs but railroads to enable her to compete success- 
fully with America in the growth of cotton, but the develop- 
ment of the one raw product will open out her hitherto un- 
known resources. 

While staying at one of the great merchant-houses in the 
fort I was able to see that the commerce of Bombay has not 
gro^vn up of itself. With some experience among hard work- 
ers in the English towns|pwas nevertheless astonished at the 
work got through by senior clerks and junior partners* at 
Bombay. Although at first led away by the idea that men 
who wear white linen suits all day, and smoke in rocking- 
chairs upon the balcony for an hour after breakfast, can not 
be said to get through much work, I soon found that men in 
merchants' houses at Bombay work harder than they would 
be likely to do at home. Their day begins at 6 a.m., and, as 
a rule, they work from then till dinner at 8 or 9 p.m., taking 
an hour for breakfast, and two for tiffin. My stay at Bombay 
was during the hottest fortnight in the year, and twelve 



Bombay. 611 

hours' work in the day, with the thermometer never under 
90° all the nighty is an exhausting life. Englishmen could 
not long survive the work, but the Bombay merchants are all 
Scotch. In British settlements, from Canada to Ceylon, from 
Dunedin to Bombay, for every Englishman that you meet 
who has worked himself up to wealth from small beginnings 
without external aid you find ten Scotchmen. It is strange, 
indeed, that Scotland has not become the popular name for 
the United Kingdom. 

Bombay life is not without its compensation. It is not al- 
ways May or June, and from November to March the climate 
is all but perfect. Even in the hottest weather the Byculla 
Club is cool, and Mahabaleswar is close at hand, for short ex- 
cursions, whenever the time is found ; while the Bombay man- 
go is a fruit which may bear comparison with the peaches of 
Salt Lake City or the melons of San Francisco. The Bom- 
bay merchants have not time, indeed, to enjoy the beauties of 
their city, any more than Londoners have to visit Westmin- 
ster Abbey or explore the Tower ; and as for " tropical indo- 
lence," or " Anglo-Indian luxury," the bull-dogs are the only 
members of the English community in India who can dis- 
cover any thing but half-concealed hardships in the life. Each 
dog has his servant to attend to all his wants, and, knowing 
this, the cunning brute always makes the boy carry him up 
the long flights of stairs that lead to the private rooms over 
the merchants' houses in the fort. 

Bombay bazar is the gayest of gay scenes. Besides the 
ordinary crowd of any "native town" there are solemn 
Jains, copj)er-colored Jews, white-coated Portuguese, Per- 
sians, Arabs, Catholic priests, bespangled nautch girls, and 
grinning Seedees. The Parsees are strongest of all the mer- 
chant peoples of Bombay in numbers, in intelligence, and in 
wealth. Among the shop-keepers of their race there is an 
over-prominence of trade shrewdness in the expression of the 
face and in the shape even of the head. The Louvre bust of 
Richelieu, in which we have the ideal of a wheedler, is a com- 
mon type in the Parsee shops of the Bombay bazar. The 
Parsee pedpe, however, whatever their looks, are not only in 
complete possession of Bombay, but are the dark-skinned race 
to which we shall have to intrust the largest share in the re- 



512 Greater Britain. 

generation of the East. Trading as they do in every city be- 
tween Galle and Astrakan^ but everywhere attached to the 
Enghsh rule, they bear to us the relative position that the 
Greeks occupy toward Russia, 

Both in religion and in education the Parsees are, as a com- 
munity, far in advance of the Indian Mohammedans and of 
the Hindoos. Their creed has become a pure deism, in which 
God's works are worshiped as the manifestations or visible 
representatives of God on earth, fire, the sun and the sea 
taking the first places; although in the climate of Bombay 
prayers to the sun must be made up of more supplications 
than thanksgivings. The Parsee men are soundly taught, and 
there is not a pauper in the whole tribe. In the education and 
elevation of women no Eastern race has as yet done much, 
but the Parsees have done the most and have paved the way 
for further progress. 

In the matter of the seclusion of women, the Parsee move- 
ment has had some effect even upon others than Parsees, and 
the Hindoos of Bombay city stand far before even those of 
Calcutta in the earnestness and success of their endeavors to 
promote the moral elevation of women. I^othing can be done 
toward the regeneration of India so long as the women of all 
classes remain in their present degradation ; and although 
many native gentlemen in Bombay already recognize the fact, 
and act upon it, progress is slow, since there is no basis upon 
which to begin. The Hindoos will not send their wives to 
schools where there are European lady teachers for fear of 
proselytism taking place, and native women teachers are not 
yet to be found ; hence all teaching must needs be left to 
men. N^othing, moreover, can be done with female children 
in Western India, where girls are married at from five to 
twelve years old. 

I had not been two days in Bombay when a placard caught 
my eye, announcing a performance at the theatre of " Romeo 
and Juliet, in the Maratta tongue;" but the play had no 
Friar Lawrence, no apothecary, and no nurse ; it was nothing 
but a simple Maratta love-tale, followed by some religious 
tableaux. In the first piece an Englishman waWntroduced, 
and represented as kicking every native that crossed his path 
with the exclamation of " Damned fool :" at each repetition 



The Mohureum. 513 

of which the whole house laughed. It is to be feared that 
this portion of the play was " founded upon fact." On my 
way home through the native town at night I came on a mar- 
riage procession better than any that I had seen. A band of 
fifers were screaming the most piercing of notes in front of 
an illuminated house, at which the horsemen and carriages 
were just arriving, both men and women clothed in jewelled 
robes and silks of a hundred colors, that flashed and glittered 
in the blaze of the red torches. The procession, like the 
greater number of the most gorgeous ceremonials of Bombay, 
was conducted by Parsees to celebrate the marriage of one 
of their own people: but it is a curious fact that night-mar- 
riages were forced upon the Parsees by the Hindoos, and one of 
the conditions upon which the Parsees were received into India 
was, that their marriage processions should take place at night. 
The Caves of Elephanta have been many times described. 
The grandest sight of India, after the Taj, is the three-faced 
bust of the Hindoo Trinity, or God in his threefold character 
of Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer. Ko Grecian sculpture 
that I have seen so well conveys the idea of Godhead. The 
Greeks could idealize man, the Italians can paint the saint, 
but the builders of Elephanta had the power of executing the 
highest ideal of a pagan god. The repose which distinguishes 
the heads of the Creator and Preserver is not the meditation 
of the saint, but the calm of unbounded power ; and the De- 
stroyer's head portends not destruction so much as annihila- 
tion to the world. The central head is, in its mysterious so- 
lemnity, that which the Sphinx should be and is not ; but one 
attribute alone is common to the expression of all three faces — 
the presence of the Inscrutable. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

THE MOHUEEUM. 



Although Poonah is the ancient Maratta capital and a 
thoroughly Hindoo city, it is famed throughout India for the 
splendor with which its people celebrate the Mohammedan 
Mohurrum, so I timed my visit in such a way as to reach the 
town upon the day of the " taboot procession." 

Y2 



514 Geeater Britain. 

The ascent from the Konkan, or flat country of Bombay, 
by the Western Ghauts to the table-land of the Deccan, known 
as the Bhore Ghaut incline, in which the railway rises from 
the plain 2000 feet into the Deccan, by a series of steps six- 
teen miles in length, is far more striking as an engineering 
work than the passage of the Alleghanies on the Baltimore 
and Ohio track, and as much inferior to the Sierra Nevada 
railway works. The views from the carriage windows are 
singularly like those in the Kaduganava Pass between Co- 
lumbo and Kandy ; in fact, the Western Ghauts are of the 
same character as the mountains of Ceylon, the hills being al- 
most invariably flat-topped or else rent by volcanic action into 
great pinnacles and needle peaks. 

The rainy season had not commenced, and the vegetation 
that gives the Ghauts their charm was wanting, although the 
" mango showers " were beginning, and spiders and other in- 
sects, unseen during the hot weather, were creeping into the 
houses to seek shelter from the rains. One of the early trav- 
ellers to the Deccan told the good folks at home that after the 
rains the spiders' webs were so thickly laced across the jun- 
gle that the natives of the country were in the habit of hiring 
elephants to walk before them and force a passage ! At the 
time of my visit neither webs nor jungle were to be seen, and 
the spiders were very harmless-looking fellows. One effect 
of the apr)roaching monsoon was visible from the summit of 
the Ghaut, for the bases of the mountains were hid by the 
low clouds that foretell the coming rains. The inclines are 
held to be unsafe during the monsoon, but they are riot so bad 
as the Kotree and Kurrachee line, which. runs only " weather 
permitting," and is rendered useless by two hours' rain — a fall 
which, luckily for the shareholders, occurs only about once in 
every seven years. On the Bhore Ghaut, on the contrary, 220 
inches in four months is not unusual, and " the rains " here 
take the place of the avalanche of colder ranges, and carry 
away bridges, lines, and trains themselves ; but in the dry 
season there is a want of the visible presence of difficulties 
overcome, which detracts from the interest of the line. 

At daybreak at Poonah the tomtoming, which had lasted 
■without intermission through the ten days' fast, came to a 
sudden end, and the police and European magistrates began 



The Mohuekum. 515 

to marshal the procession of. the taboots, or shrmes, in the 
bazar. 

A proclamation in English and Maratta was posted on the 
walls, announcing the order of the procession and the rules to 
be enforced. The orders were, that the procession to the 
river was to commence at 7 a.m. and to end at 11 a.m., and 
that tomtoming, except during those hours, would not be al- 
lowed. The taboots of the light cavalry, of three regiments 
of native infantry, and of the followers of three English regi- 
ments of the line, and of the Sappers and Miners, were, how- 
ever, to start at six o'clock : the order of precedence among 
the cantonment or regimental taboots'was carefully laid down, 
and the carrying of arms forbidden. 

When I reached the bazar, I found the native police were 
working in vain in trying to force into line a vast throng of 
bannermen, drummers, and saints who surrounded the various 
taboots or models of the house of Ali and Fatima where their 
sons Hassan and Hoosein were born. Some of the shrines 
were of the size and make of the doUs'-houses of our English 
children, others in their height and gorgeousness resembled 
the most successful of our burlesques upon Guy Fawkes : 
some were borne on litters by four men, others mounted on 
light carts and drawn l^y bullocks, while the gigantic taboot 
of the Third Cavalry required, six buffaloes for its transport 
to the river. Many privates of our native infantry regiments 
had joined the procession in uniform, and it was as strange to 
me to see privates in our service engaged in howling roimd a 
sort of Maypole, and accompanying their yells with the tom- 
tom, as it must have been to the English in Lucknow in 1857 
to hear the bands of the rebel regiments playing " Cheer, 
boys, cheer." 

Some of the troops in Poonah were kept within their lines 
all day, to be ready to suppress disturbances caused by the 
Moslem fanatics, who, excited by the Mohurrum, often run 
a-muck among their Hindoo neighbors. In old times quarrels 
between the Sonnites and Shiites, or orthodox and dissenting 
Mussulmans, used to be added to those between Mohammedans 
and Hindoos at the season of the Mohurrum, but except upon 
the Afghan border these feuds have all but died out now. 

At the head of the procession marched a row of pipers, ' 



516 Greater Britain. 

producing sounds of whicli no Highland regiment would have 
felt ashamed, followed by long-bearded, turban-wearing Ma- 
rattas, on foot and horseback, surrounding an immense pagoda- 
shaped taboot placed on a cart and drawn by bullocks ; boys 
swinging incense walked before and followed, and I remarked 
a gigantic cross — a loan, no doubt, from the Jesuit College 
for this Mohammedan festivity. After each taboot there 
came a band of Hindoo "tigers," men painted in thorough 
imitation of the jungle king, and wearing tiger ears and tails. 
Sometimes, instead of tigers, we had men painted in the colors 
worn by " sprites " in an English pantomime, and all — sprites 
and tigers — danced in the fashion of the mediaeval mummers. 
Behind the tigers and buffoons there followed women walking 
in their richest dress. The nautch girls of Poonah are reputed 
the best in all the East, but the monotonous Bombay nautch 
is not to be compared with the Cashmere nautch of Lahore. 

Some taboots were guarded on either side by sheiks on 
horseback, wearing turbans of the honorable green which de- 
notes direct descent from the Prophet, though the genealogy 
is sometimes doubtful, as in the cas'^e of the Angel Gabriel, 
who, according to Mohammedan writers, wears a green tur- 
ban, being an " honorary " descendant of Mohammed. 

Thousands of men and women thronged the road down 
which the taboots were forced to pass, or sat in the shade of 
the peepul trees until the taboot of their family or street 
came up, and then followed it, dancing and tomtom-beating 
like the rest. 

Poonah is famed for the grace of its women and the ele- 
gance of their gait. In the hot weather the saree is the sole gar- 
ment of the Hindoo women, and lends grace to the form with- 
out conceahng the outlines of the trunk or the comely shapes 
of the well-turned limbs. The saree is eight yards long, but 
of such soft thin texture that it makes no show upon the per- 
son. It is a singular testimony to the strength of Hindoo 
habits that at this Mohammedan festival the Mohammedan 
women should all be wearing the long seamless saree of the 
conquered Hindoos. 

In the Mohurrum procession at Poonah there was nothing 
distinctively Mohammedan. Hindoos joined in the festivities, 
and " Portuguese," or descendants of the slaves, half-castes, 



The Mohurrum. 617 

and native Christians who at the time of the Portuguese oc- 
cupation of Surat assumed high-sounding names and titles, 
and now form a large proportion of the inhabitants of towns 
in the Bombay Presidency. The temptation of a ten days' 
holiday is too great to be resisted by the prejudices of even 
the Christians or Hindoos. 

The procession ended at the Ghauts on the river-side, where 
the taboots, one after the other, made their exit from ten days 
of glory into unfathomable slush ; and such was the number 
of the " camp taboots," as those of the native soldiers in our 
service are styled, and the " bazar taboots," or city contribu- 
tions, that the immersion ceremonies were not completed when 
the illumination and fire-works commenced. 

After clark the bazar was lit with colored fires and with 
the ghostly paper-lanterns that give no light ; and the noise 
of tomtoms and fire-crackers recommenced in spite of proc- 
lamations and police-rules. Were there in Indian streets 
anything to burn, the Mohurrum would cause as many fires 
in Hindostan as Independence Day in the United States ; but 
although houses are burned out daily in the bazars they are 
never burned down, for nothing but water can damage mud. 
We could have played our way into Lucknow in 1857 with 
pumps and hose at least as fast as we contrived to batter a 
road into it with shot and shell. 

During the day I had been amused Avith the sayings of 
some British recruits who were watching the immersion cere- 
monies, but in the evening one of them was in the bazar, up- 
roariously drunk, kicking every native against whom he stum- 
bled, and shouting to an ofiicer of another regiment, w^ho did 
not like to interfere : " I'm a private soldier, I know, but I'm 
a gentleman ; I know what the hatmosphere is, I do ; and I 
knows a cloud when I sees it, damned if I don't !" On the 
other hand, in some fifty thousand natives holiday-making that 
day, many of them Christians and low-caste men, with no preju- 
dice against drink, a drunken man was not to be seen. 

It is impossible to over-estimate the harm done to the En- 
glish name in India by the conduct of drunken soldiers and 
" European loafers." The latter class consists chiefly of dis- 
charged railway guards and runaway sailors from Calcutta — 
men who, travelling across India and living at free-quarters 



518 Greater Britain. 

on the trembling natives, become ruffianly beyond description 
from the effect upon their originally brutal natures of the pos- 
session of unusual power. 

The popularity of Mohammedan festivals such as that of 
the Mohurrum has been one of the many causes which has 
led us to believe that the Mohammedans form a consider- 
able proportion of the population of Hindostan, but the cen- 
sus in the N'orth-west Provinces revealed the fact that they 
had there been popularly set down as three times as nu- 
merous as they are, and it is probable that the same is the 
case throughout all India. lS[ot only are the Indian Moham- 
medans few, but their Mohammedanism sits lightly on them : 
they are Hindoos in caste distinctions, in ceremonies, in daily 
life, and all but Hindoos in their actual worship. On the 
other hand, this Mohurrum showed me that the Hindoos do 
not scruple to attend the commemoration of Hassan and 
Hoosein. At Benares there is a temple which is used in 
common by Mohammedans and Hindoos, and throughout 
India, among the low-caste people, there is now little dis- 
tinction between the religions. The' descendants of the Mo- 
hammedan conquerors, who form the leading families in sev- 
eral native States, and also in Oude itself, are among the most 
dangerous of our Indian subjects, but they appear to have but 
little hold upon the humble classes of their fellow- worshipers, 
and their attempts to stir up their people to active measures 
against the English have always failed. On the other hand, 
we have hitherto somewhat ignored the claims upon our con- 
sideration of the Indian Mohammedans and still more numer- 
ous hill-tribes, and permitted our Governments to act as though 
the Hindoos and the Sikhs were the only inhabitants of Hin- 
dostan. 



CHAPTER XIX. 

ENGLISH LEABN^IN^G. 

The English traveller who crosses India from Calcutta to 
Bombay is struck with the uncivilized condition of the land. 
He has heard in England of palaces and temples, of art treas- 
ures and of native poetry, of the grace of the Hindoo maidens, 
of Cashmere shawls, of the Taj, of the Pearl Mosque, of- a 



EiraLisH Learning. 519 

civilization as perfect as the European and as old as the Chi- 
nese. When he lands and surveys the people he finds them 
naked barbarians, plunged in the densest ignorance and super- 
stition, and safe only from extermination because the European 
can not dwell permanently in the climate of their land. The 
stories we are told at home are in no sense false : the Hindoos 
of all classes are graceful in their carriage ; their tombs and 
mosques are of extraordinary beauty, their art patterns the 
despair of our best craftsman ; the native poetry is at least 
equal to our own, and the Taj the noblest building in the 
world. Every word is true, but the whole forms but a singu- 
larly small portion of the truth. The religious legends, the 
art patterns, the perfect manner, and the graceful eye and taste 
seem to have descended to the Hindoos of to-day from a gen- 
eration whose general civilization they have forgotten. The 
poetry is confined to a few members of a high-caste race, and 
is mainly an importation from abroad ; the architecture is that 
of the Moslem conquerors. Shah Jehan, a Mohammedan em- 
peror and a foreigner, built the Taj ; Akbar the Great, another 
Turk, was the designer of the Pearl Mosque ; and the Hin- 
doos can no more be credited with the architecture of their 
early conquerors than they can with the railways and bridges 
of their English rulers or with the water- works of Bombay 
city. The Sikhs are chiefly foreigners; but of the purely 
native races the Rajpoots are only fine barbarians, the Ben- 
galees mere savages, and the tribes of Central India but little 
better than the Australian aborigines or the brutes. Through- 
out India there are remains of an early civilization, but it has 
vanished as completely as it has in Egypt ; and the cave-tem- 
ples stand as far from the daily life of Hindostan as the Pyra- 
mids do from that of Egypt. 

It is to be feared that the decline has been extremely rapid 
since the day when we arrived in India. Just as it is almost 
impossible by any exertion of the mind to realize in Mexico 
the fact that the present degraded Aztecs are the same people 
whom the Spaniards found, only some three hundred years 
ago, dwelling in splendid palaces, and worshiping their un- 
known gods in golden temples through the medium of a sacred 
tongue, so now it is difficult to believe that the pauperized in- 
habitants of Orissa and the miserable peasantry of Oude are 



520 Greater Britain. 

the sons of the chivalrous warriors who fought in the last 
century against Clive. 

The truth is, that in surveying Oriental empires from a dis- 
tance we are dazzled by the splendor of the kings and priests ; 
drawing near we find an oppressed and miserable slave-class, 
from whose hard earnings the wealth of the great is wrung ; 
called on to govern the country, we extinguish the kings and 
priests in the fashion in which Captain Hodson, in 1857, shot 
the last sons of the imperial family of India in a dry ditch, 
while we were transporting the last Mogul, along with our na- 
tive thieves, in a convict ship to British Burmah. There re- 
mains the slave-class, and little else. We may select a few of 
these to be our policemen and torturers-in-chief, we may pick 
another handful to wear red coats, and be our guards and the 
executioners of their countrymen ; we may teach a few to 
chatter some words of English, and then, calling them great 
scoundrels, may set them in our railway stations and our offi- 
ces ; but virtually, in annexing any Eastern country, we destroy 
the ruling-class, and reduce the government to a mere impe- 
rialism, where one man rules and the rest are slaves. ISTo par- 
allel can be drawn in Europe or North America to that state 
of things which exists wherever we carry our arms in the 
East: were the President and Congress in America, and all 
the wealthy merchants of the great towns, to be destroyed to- 
morrow, the next day would see the Government proceeding 
quietly in the hands of another set every bit as intelligent, as 
wise, and good. In a lesser degree the same would be the 
case in England or in France. The best example that could 
be given nearer home of that which occurs continually in the 
East w^ould be one which should suppose that the Emperor 
and nobility in Russia were suddenly destroyed, and the coun- 
try left in the hands of the British embassador and the late 
serfs. Even this example would fail to convey a notion of the 
extent of the revolution which takes place on the conquest by 
Britain of an Eastern country ; for in the East the nobles are 
better taught and the people more ignorant than they are in 
Russia, and the change causes a more complete destruction of 
poetry, of literature, and of art. 

It being admitted, then, that we are in the position of hav- 
ing in Hindostan a numerous and ignorant, but democratic 



English Leakning. 521 

people to govern from without, there comes the question of 
what should be the general character of our government. 
The immediate questions of the day may be left to our subor- 
dinates in India ; but the direction and the tendencies of legis- 
lation are matters for us at home. There can be nothing 
more ridiculous than the position of those of our civilians in 
India who, while they treat the natives with profound con- 
tempt, are continually crying out against government from at 
home, on the ground set forth in the shibboleth of " India for 
the Indians." If India is to be governed by the British race 
at all it must be governed from Great Britain. The general 
conditions of our rule must be dictated at London by the 
English people, and nothing but the execution of our decrees', 
the collection of evidence, and the framing of mere rules, left 
to our subordinates in the East. 

First among the reforms that must be introduced from Lon- 
don is the general instruction in the English language of the 
native population. Except upon a theory that will fairly admit 
of the forcing upon a not unwilling people of this first of all 
great means of civilization, our presence in India is wholly in- 
defensible. Unless also that be done, our presence in India, 
or that of some nation stronger than us and not more scru- 
pulous, must endure forever, for it is plainly impossible that a 
native government capable of holding its own against Russia 
and America can otherwise be built up in Hindostan. Upon 
the contrary supposition — namely, that we do not intend at 
any time to quit our hold on India — ^the instruction of the 
people in our language becomes still more important. Upon 
the second theory we must teach them English, the language 
of the British Government ; upon the first, English, the lan- 
guage of the world. Upon either theory we must teach them 
English. Nothing can better show the trivial character of 
the much-talked-of reforms introduced into India in the last 
few years, since our queen has assumed the imperial throne 
of Hindostan, than the fact that no progress whatever has 
been made in a matter of far more grave importance than are 
any number of miles of railway, canal, or Grand Trunk roads. 
Our civilians in India tell us that if you teach the natives En- 
glish you expose them to the attacks of Christian missionaries, 
and us to revolt — an exposure which speaks not too highly of 



522 Gkeater Britain. 

the Government which is forced to make it. Our military- 
officers, naturally hating the country to which they now are 
exiled, instead of being sent as formerly of their own free-will, 
tell you that every native who can speak English is a scoundrel, 
a liar, and a thief, which is, perhaps, if we except the Parsees, 
not far from true at present, when teaching is given only to a 
few lads, who thus acquire a monopoly of the offices in which 
money passes through native hands. Their opinion has no 
bearing whatever upon a general instruction of the people, un- 
der which we should evidently be able to pick our men, as we 
now pick them for all employments in which a knowledge of 
English is not required. 

A mere handful of Spaniards succeeded in naturalizing 
their language in a country twice as large as Europe : in the 
whole of South America, the Central States, and Mexico. 
IN'ot only there, but in the United States, the Utes and Co- 
manches, wild as they are, speak Spanish, while their own lan- 
guage is forgotten. In the west of Mexico there is no trace of 
pure Spanish blood, there is even comparatively little mixture 
— ^yet Spanish, and that of the best, is' spoken, to the exclusion 
of every other language in Manzanillo and Acapulco. This 
phenomenon is not confined to the Western world. In Bom- 
bay Presidency five millions of so-called Portuguese — who, 
however, for the most part are pure Hindoos — speak a Latin 
tongue, and worship at the temples of the Christian God. 
French makes progress in Saigon, Dutch in Java. In Canada 
we find the Huron Indians French in language and religion, 
English alone, it would seem, can not be pressed upon any of 
the dark-skinned tribes. In "New Zealand the Maories know 
no English ; in Natal, the Zulus ; in India, the Hindoos. The 
Dutch, finally expelled from South Africa in 1815 and from 
Ceylon 1802, have yet more hold by their tongue upon the 
natives of those lands than hav« the English — masters of 
them since the Dutch expulsion. 

To the early abolition or total non-existence of slavery in 
the British colonies we may, perhaps, trace our unfortunate 
failure to spread our mother - tongue. Dutch, Portuguese, 
Spaniards, all practiced a slavery of the widest kind ; all had 
about them not native servants, frequently changing from the 
old master to the new, and passing unheeded to whatever 



English Learning. 523 

service money could tempt them to engage in, but domestic 
slaves, bred up in the family, and destined, probably, to die 
within the house where they were reared, to whom the lan- 
guage of the master was taught, because your Spanish gran- 
dee, with power of life and death over his family slaves, was 
not the man to condescend to learn his servants' tongue in or- 
der that his commands should be more readily understood. 
Another reason may have caused the Portuguese and other 
dominant races of the later Middle Ages to have insisted that 
their slaves should learn the language of the master and the 
Government; namely, that in learning the new the servile 
families would speedily forget the older tongue, and thus be- 
come as incapable of mixing in the conspiracies and insurrec- 
tions .of their brother natives as Pyrenean shepherd-dogs of con- 
sorting with their progenitors, the wolves. Whatever their 
reasons, however, the Spaniards succeeded where we have 
failed. 

The greatest of our difficulties are the financial. No cheap 
system is workable by us, and our dear system we have not 
the means to work. The success of our rule immediately de- 
pends upon the purity and good feeling of the rulers, yet 
there are villages in British India where the people have 
never seen a white man, and off the main roads, and outside 
the district towns, the sight of a European official is ex- 
tremely rare. To the inhabitants of the greater portion of 
rural India the governor who symbolizes British rule is a 
cruel and corrupt Hindoo policeman : himself not improbably 
a Bengal mutineer m 1857, or drawn from the classes whom 
our most ignorant Sepoys themselves despised. It is not 
easy to see how this vital defect, can be amended, except by 
the slow process of raising up a native population that we can 
trust and put in office, and this is impossible unless we en- 
courage and reward the study of the English tongue. The 
most needed of all social reforms in India, an improvement in 
the present thoroughly servile condition of the native women, 
could itself in no way be more easily brought about than by 
the familiarization of the Hindoos with English literature; 
and that greatest of all the curses of India, false-swearing in 
the courts, would undoubtedly be both directly and indirectly 
checked by the introduction of our language. The spread of 



524 Greater Britain. 

the English tongue need be no check to that of the ancient 
classical languages of the East: the two studies would go 
hand in hand. It is already a disgrace to us that while we 
spend annually in India a large sum upon our chaplains and 
church schools, we toss only one-hundredth part of the sum — 
a paltry few thousands of rupees — to the native colleges, where 
the most venerable of languages — Sanscrit, Arabic, and Per- 
sian — are taught by the men who alone can thoroughly under- 
stand them. At the moment when England, Germany, and 
America are struggling for the palm in the teaching of Ori- 
ental literature — when Oxford, Edinburgh, and London are 
contending with each other, and with Berlin, Yale, and Har- 
vard, in translating and explaining Eastern books — our Gov- 
ernment in India is refusing the customary help to the publi- 
cation of Sanscrit works, and starving the teachers of the lan- 
guage. 

So long as the natives remain ignorant of the English 
tongue they remain ignorant of all the civilization of our time 
— ignorant alike of political and physical science, of philoso- 
phy and true learning. It is needless to say that, if French 
or German were taught them instead of English, they would 
be as well off in this respect ; but English, as the tongue of 
the ruling race, has the vast advantage that its acquisition by 
the Hindoos will soon place the Government of India in na- 
tive hands, and thus, gradually relieving us of an almost in- 
tolerable burden, will civilize and set free the people of Hin- 
dostan. 



CHAPTER XX. 

INDIA. 

" All general observations upon India are necessarily ab- 
surd," said to me at Simla a distinguished officer of the vice- 
roy's Government ; but although this is true enough of theo- 
ries that bear upon the customs, social or religious, of the 
forty or fifty peoples which make up what in England we 
style the " Hindoo race," it has no bearing on the considera- 
tion of the policy which should guide our actual administra- 
tion of the empire. 



India. 525 

England in the East is not the England that we know. 
Flousy Britannia, with her anchor and ship, becomes a mys- 
terious Oriental despotism, ruling a sixth of the human race, 
nominally for the natives' own good, and certainly for no one 
else's, by laws and in a manner opposed to every tradition 
and every prejudice of the whole of the various tribes of 
which this vast population is composed — scheming, annexing, 
out-manoeuvring Russia, and sometimes, it is to be feared, 
out-lying Persia herself. 

In our island home we plume ourselves upon our hatred of 
political extraditions : we would scorn to ask the surrender 
of a political criminal of our own, we would die in the last 
ditch sooner than surrender those of another crown. What a 
contrast we find to this when we look at our conduct in the 
East. During the mutiny of 1857 some of our rebel subjects 
escaped into the Portuguese territory at Goa. We demanded 
their extradition, which the Portuguese refused. We insist- 
ed. The offer we finally accepted was, that they should be 
transported to the Portuguese settlement at Timor, we sup 
plying transports. An Indian transport conveying these men 
to their island grave, but carrying the British flag, touched at 
Batavia in 1858, to the astonishment of the honest Dutchmen, 
who knew England as a defender of national liberty in Eu- 
rope. 

Although despotic, our government of India is not bad ; 
indeed, the hardest thing that can be said of it is that it is 
too good. We So our duty by the natives manfully, but 
they care little about that, and we are continually hurting 
their prejudices and offendiug them in small things, to which 
they attach more importance than they do to great. To con- 
ciliate the Hindoos we should spend .£10,000 a year in sup- 
port of native literature to please the learned, and £10,000 
on fire-works to delight the wealthy and the low-caste people. 
Instead of this, we worry them with municipal institutions and 
benevolent inventions that they can not and will not under- 
stand. The attempt to introduce trial by jury into certain 
parts of India was laudable, but it has ended in one of those 
failures which discredit the Government in the eyes of its 
own subordinates. If there is a European foreman of jury, 
the natives salaam to him, and ask : " What does the sahib 



526 Greater Britain. 

say ?" If not, they look across the court to the native bar- 
risters, who hold up fingers, each of which means 100 rs., and 
thus bid against each other for the verdict ; for while natives 
as a rule are honest in their personal or individual dealings, 
yet in places of trust — railway clerkships, secretaryships of 
departments, and so on — they are almost invariably willing 
to take bribes. 

Throughout India such trials as are not before a jury are 
conducted with the aid of native assessors as members of the 
court. This works almost as badly as the jury does, the judge 
giving his decision vrithout any reference to the opinion of 
the assessors. The story runs that the only use of assessors 
is, that in an appeal-^where the judge and assessors had 
agreed — the advocate can say that the judge " has abdicated 
his functions, and yielded to the absurd oj^inion of a couple of 
ignorant and dishonest natives " — or, if the judge had gone 
against his client in spite of the assessors being inclined the 
other way, that the judge " has decided in the teeth of all ex- 
perienced and impartial native opinion, as declared by the 
voices of two honest and intelligent assessors." 

Our introduction of juries is not an isolated instance of 
our somewhat blind love for " jDrogress." If in the already- 
published portions of the civil code — for instance, the parts 
which relate to succession, testamentary and intestate — you 
read in the illustrations York for Delhi, and Pimlico for Sul- 
tanpore, there is not a word to show that the code is meant 
for India, or for an Oriental race at all. ?t is true that the 
testamentary portion of the code applies at present only to 
European residents in India ; but the advisability of extending 
it to natives is under consideration, ancP this extension is only 
a matter of time. The result of over-great rapidity of legisla- 
tion, and of unyielding adherence to English or Roman mod- 
els in the Indian codes, must be that our laws will never have 
the slightest hold upon the people, and that if we are swept 
from India our laws will vanish with us. The Western char- 
acter of our codes, and their want of elasticity and of adapta- 
bility to Eastern conditions, is one among the many causes of 
our unpopularity. 

The old-school Hindoos fear that we aim at subverting all 
their dearest and most venerable institutions, and the free-- 



India. 527 

thinkers of Calcutta and the educated natives hate us because, 
while we preach culture and progress, we give them no chance 
of any but a subordinate career. The discontent of the first- 
named class we can gradually allay by showing them the 
groundlessness of their suspicions, but the shrewd Bengalee 
baboos are more difficult to deal with, and can be met only in 
one way — namely, by the employment of the natives in offices 
of high trust, under the security afforded by the infliction of 
the most degrading penalties on proof of the smallest corrup- 
tion. One of the points in which the policy of Akbar surpass- 
ed our own was in the association of qualified Hindoos with 
his Mohammedan fellow-countrymen in high places in his 
government. The fact, moreover, that native governments 
are still preferred to British rule is a strong argument in favor 
of the employment by us of natives ; for, roughly speaking, 
their governmental system differs from ours only in the em- 
ployment of native officers instead of English. There is not 
now existent a thoroughly native government ; at some time or 
other we have controlled in a greater or less degree the govern- 
ments of all the native Sffeites. To study purely native rule 
we should have to visit Cabool or Herat, and watch the Af- 
ghan princes putting out each other's eyes, while their peoj^le 
are engaged in never-ending wars or in murdering strangers 
in the name of God. 

Natives might more safely be employed to fill the higher 
than the lower offices. It is more easy to find honest and 
competent native governors or councilmen than honest and 
efficient native clerks and policemen. Moreover, natives have 
more temptations to be corrupt, and more facilities for being 
so with safety, in low positions than in high. A native police- 
man or telegraph official can take his bribe without fear of de- 
tection by his European chief : not so a native governor, mth 
European subordinates about him. 

The common Anglo-Indian objections to the employment 
of natives in our service are, when examined, found to apply 
only to the employment of incompetent natives. To say that 
the native lads of Bengal, educated in our Calcutta colleges, 
are half educated and grossly immoral, is to say that, under a 
proper system of selection of officers, they could never come 
to be employed. All that is necessary at the moment is that 



528 Greater Britain. 

we should concede the principle by appointing, year by year, 
more natives to high posts, and that, by holding the civil ser- 
vice examinations in India as well as in England, and by es- 
tablishing throughout India well-regulated schools, we should 
place the competent native youths upon an equal footing with 
the English. 

That we shall ever come to be thoroughly popular in India 
is not to be expected. By the time the old ruhng families 
have died out or completely lost their power the peo2)le w^iom 
Ave rescued from their oppression will have forgotten that the 
oppression ever existed, and as long as the old families last they 
will hate us steadily. One of the documents published in the 
Gazette of India while I was at Simla was from the pen of As- 
uduUa Muhamadi, one of the best known Mohammedans of the 
North-west Provinces. His grievances were the cessation of 
the practice of granting annuities to the *' sheiks of noble fam- 
ilies;" the conferring of the "high offices of Mufti, Sudr'- 
Ameen, and Tahsildar " on persons not of " noble extraction ;" 
" the education of the children of the higher and lower classes on 
the same footing, without distinction ;" " the desire that wom- 
en should be treated like men in every respect," and " the forma- 
tion of English schools for the education of girls of the lower 
order." He ended his State paper by pointing out the ill effects 
of the practice of conferring on the poor " respectable berths, 
thereby enabling them to indulge in luxuries which their fathers 
never dreamt of and to play the upstart ;" and declared that to 
a time-honored system of class government there had succeeded 
" a state of things which I can not find words to express." It 
is not likely that our rule will ever have much hold on the class 
that AsuduUa represents, for not only is our government in In- 
dia a despotism, but its tendency is to become an imperialism, 
or despotism exercised over a democratic people, such as we 
see in France, and are commencing to see in Russia. 

We are levelling all ranks in India ; we are raising the 
humblest men, if they will pass certain examinations, to posts 
which we refuse to the most exalted of nobles unless they can 
pass higher. A clever son of a bheestie or sweeper, if he will 
learn English, not only may, but must rise to be a railway ba- 
boo or deputy-collector of customs; whereas for Hindoo ra- 
jahs or Mohammedan nobles of Delhi creation there is no 



India. 529 

chance of any thing but gradual decline of fortune. Even our 
Star of India is democratic in its working : we refuse it to 
men of the highest descent to confer it on self-made viziers 
of native States, or others who were shrewd enough to take 
our side during the rebellion. All this is very modern, and 
full of " progress," no doubt ; but it is progress toward impe- 
rialism, or equality of conditions under paternal despotism. 

Not only does the democratic character of our rule set the 
old families against us, but it leads also to the failure of our 
attempt to call around us a middle-class, an educated thinking 
body of natives with something to lose, who, seeing that we 
are ruling India for her own'good, would support us heart and 
soul, and form the best of bucklers for our dominion. As it 
is, the attempt has long been made in name, but, as a matter of 
fact, we have humbled^ the upper-class, and failed to raise a 
middle-class to take its place. We have crushed the prince 
without setting up the trader in his stead. 

The wide-spread hatred of the English does not prove that 
they are bad rulers ; it is merely the hatred that Easterns al- 
ways bear their masters ; yet masters the Hindoos will have. 
Even the enlightened natives do not look with longing toward a 
future of self-government, however distant. Most intelligent 
Hindoos would like to see the Russians drive us out of India, 
not that any of them think the Russians would be better rulers 
or kinder men, but merely for the pleasure of seeing their 
traditional oppressors beaten. What, then, are we to do? 
The only justification for our presence in India is the education 
for freedom of the Indian races ; but at this moment they will 
not have freedom as a gift, and many Indian statesmen declare 
that no amount of education will ever fit them for it. For a 
score of centuries the Hindoos have bribed and taken bribes, 
and corruption has eaten into the national character so deeply 
that those who are the best of judges declare that it can never 
be washed out. The analogy of the rise of other races leads 
us to hope, however, that the lapse of time will be sufficient to 
raise the Hindoos as it has raised the Huns. 

The ancients believed that the neighborhood of frost and 
snow was fatal to philosophy and to the arts ; to the Cartha- 
ginians, Egyptians, and Phoenicians the inhabitants of Gaul, 
of Germany, and of Britain were rude barbarians of the frozen 

Z 



530 Greater Britain. 

North, that no conceivable lapse of time could convert into 
any thing much better than talking bears — a piece of empiri- 
cism which has a close resemblance to our view of India. It 
is idle to point to the tropics and say that free communities 
do not exist within those limits : the map of the world will 
show that freedom exists only in the homes of the English 
race. France, the authoress of modern liberty, has failed as 
yet to learn how to retain the boon for which she is ever ready 
to shed her blood ; Switzerland, a so-called free State, is the 
home of the worst of bigotry and intolerance ; the Spanish re- 
publics are notoriously despotisms under democratic titles; 
America, Australia, Britain, the homes of our race, are as yet 
the only dwelling-spots of freedom. 

There is much exaggeration in the (yy that self-government, 
personal independence, and true manliness can exist only where 
the snow will lie upon the ground, that cringing slavishness 
and imbecile submission follow the palm-belt round the world. 
If freedom be good in one country it is good in all, for there is 
nothing in its essence which should limit it in time or place : 
the only question that is open for debate is whether freedom 
-^an admitted good — is a benefit which, if once conferred upon 
the inhabitants of the tropics, will be maintained by them 
against invasion from abroad and rebellion from within ; if it 
be given bit by bit, each step being taken only when public 
opinion is fully prepared for its acceptance, there can be no 
fear that freedom will ever be resigned without a struggle. 
We should know that Sikhs, Kandians, Scindians, Marattas 
have fought bravely enough for national independence to make 
it plain that they will struggle to the death for liberty as soon 
as they can be made to see its worth. It will take years to 
efface the stain of a couple of hundred years of slavery in the 
negroes of America, and it, may take scores of years to heal 
the deeper sores of Hindostan ; but history teaches us to be- 
lieve that the time wiU come when the Indians will be fit for 
freedom. 

Whether the future advent of a better day for India be a 
fact or a dream, our presence in the country is justifiable. 
Were we to quit India we must leave her to Russia or to her- 
self. If to Russia, the political shrewdness and commercial 
blindness of the Northern Power would combine to make our 



India. 531 

pocket suffer by loss of money as much as would our dignity 
by so plain a confession of our impotence ; while the unhappy 
Indians would discover that there exists a European nation 
capable of surpassing Eastern tyrants in corruption by as 
much as it already exceeds them in dull weight of leaden 
cruelty and oppression. If to herself, unextinguishable anar- 
chy would involve our Eastern trade and India's happiness in 
a hideous and lasting ruin. 

If we are to keep the country we must consider gravely 
whether it be possible properly to administer its affairs upon 
the present system — whether, for instance, the best supreme 
government for an Eastern empire be a body composed of a 
chief invariably removed from office just as he begins to un- 
derstand his duty, and a council of worn-out Indian officers, 
the whole being placed in the remotest corner of Western 
Europe, for the sake of removing the government from the 
" pernicious influence of local prejudice." 

India is at this moment governed by 'the Indian Council at 
Westminster, who are responsible to nobody. The Secretary 
of State is responsible to Parliament for a policy he can not 
control, and the vigeroy is a head-clerk. 

India can be governed in two ways ; either in India or in 
London. Under the former plan we should leave the bureau- 
cracy in India independent, preserving merely some slight con- 
trol at home— a control which should, of course, be purely 
parliamentary and English ; under the other plan — which is 
that to which it is to be hoped the people of England will 
command their representatives to adhere — India would be 
governed from London by the English nation, in the interests 
of humanity and civilization. Under either system the Indian 
Council in London would be valuable as an advising body ; 
but it does not follow, because the Council can advise, that 
therefore they can govern, and to delegate executive power to 
such a board is on the face of it absurd. 

Whatever the powers to be granted to the Indian Council, 
it is clear that the members should hold office for the space of 
only a few years. So rapid is the change that is now making 
a nation out of what was ten years ago but a continent in- 
habited by an agglomeration of distinct tribes, that no Anglo- 
Indian who has left India for ten years is competent even to 



532 Greater Britain. 

advise the rulers, much less himself to share in the ruling, of 
Hindostan. The objection to the government of India by the 
Secretary of State is, that the tenant of the office changes fre- 
quently, and is generally ignorant of native feelings and of 
Indian affairs. The difficulty, however, which attends the in- 
troduction of a successful plan for the government of India 
from London is far from being irremovable, while the objection 
to the paternal government of India by a viceroy is that it 
would be wholly opposed to our constitutional theories, unfit- 
ted to introduce into our Indian system those democratic 
principles which we have for ten years been striving to im- 
plant, and even in the long run dangerous to our liberties at 
home. 

One reason why the Indian officials cry out against govern- 
ment from St. James's Park is, because they deprecate inter- 
ference with the viceroy; but were the Council abolished, ex- 
cept as a consultative body, and the Indian Secretaryship of 
State made a permanent appointment, it is probable that the 
viceroy would be relieved from that continual and minute in- 
terference with his acts which at present degrades his office in 
native eyes. The viceroy would be left considerable power, 
and certainly greater power than he has at present, by the 
Secretary of State ; that which is essential is merely that the 
power of control, and responsible control, should lie in London. 
The viceroy would in practice exercise the executive functions, 
under the control of a Secretary of State, advised by an expe- 
rienced Council and responsible to Parliament, and we should 
possess a system under Avhich there would be that conjunction 
of personal responsibility and of skilled advice which is abso- 
lutely required for the good government of India. 

To a scheme which involves the government of India from 
at home it may be objected, that India can not be so well un- 
derstood in London as in Calcutta. So far from this being 
the case, there is but little doubt among those who best know 
the India of to-day that while men in Calcutta understand 
the wants of the Bengalee, and men in Lahore the feelings of 
the Sikh, India, as a whole, is far better understood in England 
than in any Presidency town. 

It must be remembered that with India within a day of 
England by telegraph, and within three weeks by steam, the 



India. 533 

old autocratic Governor-general has become impossible, and 
day by day the Secretary of State in London must become 
more and more the ruler of India. Were the Secretary of 
State appointed for a term of years, and made irremovable ex- 
cept by a direct vole of the House of Commons, no fault 
could be found with the results of the inevitable change : as 
it is, however, a council of advice will hardly be sufficient to 
prevent gross blundering while we allow India to be ruled 
by no less than four Secretaries of State in a single year. 

The chief considerations to be kept in view in the framing 
of a system of government for India are briefly these : a suf- 
ficient separation of the two countries to prevent the clashing 
of the democratic and paternal systems, but, at the same time, 
a control over the Indian administration by the English peo- 
ple active enough to insure the progressive amelioration of 
the former ; the minor points to be borne in mind are that in 
India we need less centraUzation, in London more permanence, 
and in both increased personal responsibility. All these re- 
quirements are satisfied by the plan proposed, if it be coupled 
with the separation of the English and Indian armies, the em- 
ployment of natives in our service, and the creation of new 
governments for the Indus territories and Assam. Madras, 
Bombay, Bengal, Assam, the Central Provinces, Agra, the In- 
dus, Oude, and Burmah would form the nine Presidencies, the 
viceroy having the supreme control over our officers in the 
native States, and not only should the governors of the last 
seven be placed upon the same footing with those of Mad- 
ras and Bombay, but all the local governors should be assisted 
by a council of ministers who should necessarily be consulted, 
but whose advice should not be binding on the governors. 
The objections that are raised against councils do not apply 
to councils that are confined to the giving of advice, and the 
ministers are needed, if for no other purpose at least to divide 
the labor of the governor, for all our Indian officials are at 
present overworked. 

This is not the place for the suggestion of improvements 
in the details of Indian government. The statement that all 
general observations upon India are necessarily absurd is not 
more true of moral, social, educational, and religious affairs 
than of mere governmental matters : " regulation system " 



534 Greater Britain. 

and " non-regulation system ;" " permanent settlement " and 
" thirty years' settlement ;" native participation in govern- 
ment, or exclusion of natives — each of these courses may be 
good in one part of India and bad in another. On the whole, 
however, it may be admitted, that our Indian government is 
the best example of a well-administered despotism, on a large 
scale, existing in the world. Its one great fault is over-cen- 
tralization ; for, although our rule in India must needs be 
despotic, no reason can be shown why its despotism should bs 
minute. 

The greatest of the many changes in progress in the East 
is that India is being made — that a country is being created 
under that name where none has yet existed ; and it is our 
railroads, our annexations, and above all our centralizing poli- 
cy that are doing the work. There is reason to fear that this 
change will be hastened by the extension of our new codes to 
the former " non-regulation provinces " and by government 
fi'om at home, where India is looked upon as one nation, in- 
stead of from Calcutta, where it is known to be still composed 
of fifty ; but so rapid is the change that already the Calcutta 
people are as mistaken in attempting to laugh down our 
phrase " the people of India," as we were during the mutiny 
when we believed that there was an " India " writhing in our 
clutches. Whether the India which is being thus rapidly 
built up by our own hands will be friendly to us, or the re- 
verse, depends upon ourselves. The two principles upon 
which our administration of the country might be based have 
long since been weighed against each other by the English 
people, who, rejecting the principle of a holding of India for 
the acquisition of prestige and trade, have decided that we 
are to govern India in the interest of the people of Hindo- 
stan. We are now called on to deliberate once more, but this 
time upon the method by which our principle is to be worked 
out. That our administration is already perfect can hardly 
be contended so long as no officer not very high in our Indian 
service dares to call a native " friend." The first of all our 
cares must be the social treatment of the people, for while by 
the queen's proclamation the natives are our fellow-subjects 
they are in practice not yet treated as our fellow-men. 



Dependencies.. 535 



CHAPTER XXI. 

DEPENDENCIES. 

When on my way home to England I found myself off 
Mocha, with the Abyssinian highlands in sight, and still more 
when we were off Massowah, with the peaks of Talanta plain- 
ly visible, I began to recall the accounts which I had heard at 
Aden of the proposed British colony on the Abyssinian table- 
lands, out of which the Home Government has since been 
frightened. The question of the desirability or the reverse of 
such a colony raises points of interest on which it would be 
advisable that people at home should at once take up a line. 

As it has never been assumed that Englishmen can dwell 
permanently even upon high hills under the equator, the prop- 
osition for European colonization or settlement of tropical 
Africa may be easily dismissed, but that for the annexation of 
tropical countries for trade purposes remains. It has hither- 
to been accepted as a general principle regulating our inter- 
course with Eastern nations that we have a moral right to 
force the dark-skinned races to treat us in the same fashion as 
that in which we are treated by our European neighbors. In 
practice we even now go much farther than this, and inflict 
the blessings of Free Trade upon the reluctant Chinese and 
Japanese at the cannon's mouth. It is hard to find any law 
but that of might whereby to justify our dealings with Bur- 
mah, China, and Japan. We are apt to wrap ourselves up in 
our new-found national morality, and throwing upon our fa- 
thers all the blame of the ill which has been done in India, to 
take to ourselves credit for the good ; but it is obvious to any 
one who watches the conduct of our admirals, consuls, and 
traders in the China seas that it is inevitable that China 
should fall to us as India fell, unless there should be a singu- 
lar change in opinion at home, or unless, indeed, the Ameri- 
cans should be beforehand with us in the matter. To say this 
is not to settle the disputed question of whether in the present 
improved state of feeling, and with the present control exer- 
cised over our Eastern officials by a disinterested press at 



536 Greater Britain. 

home and an interested but vigilant press in India and the 
Eastern ports, government of China by Britain might not be 
for the advantage of the Chinese and the world, but it is at 
least open to serious doubt whether it would be to the advan- 
tage of Great Britain. Our ruling-classes are already at least 
suflficiently exposed to the corrupting influences of power for 
us to hesitate before we decide that the widening of the na- 
tional mind consequent upon the acquisition of the government 
of China would outweigh the danger of a spread at home of 
love of absolute authority and indifference to human happi- 
ness and life. The Americans, also, it is to be hoped, will 
pause before they expose republicanism to the shock that 
would be caused by the annexation of despotically-governed 
States. In defending the Japanese against our assaults and 
those of the active but unsuccessful French, they may unhap- 
pily find, as we have often found, that protection and annexa- 
tion are two words for the same thing. 

Although the disadvantages are more evident than the ad- 
vantages of the annexation for commercial purposes of such 
countries as Abyssinia, China, and Japan, the benefits are 
neither few nor hard to find. The abstract injustice of an- 
nexation can not be said to exist in the cases of Afghanistan 
and Abyssinia, as the sentiment of nationality clearly has no 
existence there, and as the worst possible form of British gov- 
ernment is better for the mass of the people than the best 
conceivable rule of an Abyssinian chief. The dangers of an- 
nexation in the weakening and corrupting of ourselves may 
not unfairly be set off against the blessings of annexation to 
the people, and the most serious question for consideration is 
that of whether dependencies can be said *^ to pay." Social 
progress is necessary to trade, and we give to mankind the 
powerful security of self-interest that we will raise the condi- 
tion of the people, and, by means of improved communications, 
open the door to civilization. 

It may be objected to this statement that our exaggerated 
conscientiousness is the very reason why our dependencies 
commercially are failures, and why it is useless for us to be 
totaling up our loss and profits while we willfully throw away 
the advantages that our energy has placed in our hands. If 
India paid as well as Java, it may be shown, we should be re- 



Dependencies. 537 

ceiving from the East 60 millions sterling a year for the sup- 
port of our European officials in Hindostan, and the total 
revenue of India would be 200 or 250 miUions, of which 80 
milhons would be clear profit for our use in England ; in other 
words, Indian profits would relieve us from all taxation in 
England, and leave us a considerable and increasing margin 
toward the abolition of the debt. The Dutch, too, tell us that 
their system is more agreeable to the natives than our own 
clumsy though well-meant efforts for the improvement of their 
condition, which, although not true, is far too near the truth 
to allow us to rest in our complacency. 

The Dutch system having been well weighed at home, and 
dehberately rejected by the English people as tending to the 
degradation of the natives, the question remains how far de- 
pendencies from which no profits are exacted may be advan- 
tageously retained for mere trade purposes. At this moment 
our most flourishing dependencies do not bear so much as their 
fair share of the expenses of the empire : Ceylon herself pays 
only the nominal and not the real cost of her defense, and Mauri- 
tius costs nominally £150,000 a year, and above half a million 
really in military expenses, of which the colony is ordered to pay 
£45,000, and grumbles much at paying it. India herself, al- 
though charged with a share of the non-effective expe»ses of 
our army, escapes scot-free in war-time, and it is to be re- 
marked that the throwing upon her of a small portion of the 
cost of the Abyssinian war was defended upon every ground 
except the true one — ^namely, that as an integral part of the 
empire she ought to bear her share in imperial wars. It is true 
that, to make the constitutional doctrine hold, she also ought 
to be consulted, and that we have no possible machinery for 
consulting her — a consideration which of itself shows our In- 
dian Government in its true light. 

Whether, indeed, dependencies pay or do not pay their act- 
ual cost, their retention standafcon a wholly different footing 
to that of colonies. Were we to leave Australia or the Cape 
we should continue to be the chief customers of those coun- 
tries : were we to leave India or Ceylon they would have no 
customers at all ; for falling inifco anarchy, they would cease at 
once to export their goods to us and to coj^sume our manu- 
factures. When a British Governor of New Zealand wrote 

Z 2 



638 Greater Britain. 

that of every Maori who fell in war with us it might be said 
that, " from his ignorance, a man had been destroyed whom a 
few months' enlightenment would have rendered a valuable 
consumer of British manufactured goods," he only set forth 
with grotesque simplicity considerations which weigh with us 
all ; but while the advance of trade may continue to be our 
chief excuse, it need not be our sole excuse for our Eastern 
dealings — even for use toward ourselves. Without repeating 
that which I have said with respect to India, we may especial- 
ly bear in mind that, although the theory has suffered from ex- 
aggeration, our dependencies still form a nursery of statesmen 
and of warriors, and that we should irresistibly fall into na- 
tional sluggishness of thought were it not for the world-wide 
interests given us by the necessity of governing and educating 
the inhabitants of so vast an empire as our own. 

One of the last of our annexations was close upon our bow 
as we passed on our way from Aden up the Red Sea. The 
French are always angry when we seize on places in the East, 
but it is hardly wonderful that they should have been per- 
plexed about Perim. This island stands in the narrowest 
place in the sea, in the middle of the deep water, and the Suez 
Canal being a French work, and Egypt under French influence, 
our possession of Perim becomes especially unpleasant to our 
neighbors, l^ot only this, but the French had determined 
themselves to seize it, and their fleet, bound to Perim, put in 
to Aden to coal. The governor had his suspicions, and hav- 
ing asked the French admiral to dinner, gave him unexcep- 
tionable champagne. The old gentleman soon began to talk, 
and directly he mentioned Perim the governor sent a pencil- 
note to the harbor-master to delay the coaling of the ships, 
and one to the commander of a gun-boat to embark as many 
artillerymen and guns as he could get on board in two hours 
and sail for Perim. When the French reached the anchorage 
next day they found the British flag flying, and a great show 
of guns in {)Osition. Whether they put into Aden on their 
way back to France history does not say. 

Perim is not the only island that lies directly in the short- 
est course for ships, nor are liie rocks the only dangers of the 
Red Sea. On^pight about nine o'clock, when we were off the 
port of Mecca, I was sitting on the fo'castle, right forward, al- 



France in the East. 639 

most on the sprit, to catch what breeze we n^de, when I saw 
two countiy boats about 150 yards on. the starboard bow. 
Our three lights were so bright that I thought we must be 
seen, but as the boats came on across our bows I gave a shout 
which was instantly followed by "hard a-port!" from the 
Chinaman on the bridge, and by a hundred yells from the sud- 
denly-awakened boatmen. Our helm luckily enough had no 
time to act upon the ship. I threw myself down under a 
stancheon, and the sail and yard of the leading boat fell on 
our deck close to my head, and the boats shot past us amid 
shouts of "fire," caused by the ringing of the alarm-bell. 
When we had stopped the ship the question came — had we 
sunk the boat ? "We at once piped away the gig with a Malay 
crew and sent it off to look for the poor wretches — but after 
half an hour, we found them ourselves, and found them safe 
except for their loss of canvas and their terrible fright. Our 
pilot questioned them in Arabic, and discovered that each 
boat had on board 100 pilgrims ; but they excused themselves 
for not having a watch or light by saying that they had not 
seen us ! Between rocks and pilgrim-boats Red Sea naviga- 
tion is hard enough for steamers, and it is easy to see which 
way its difficulties will cause the scale to turn when the ques- 
tion lies between Euphrates Railway and Suez Canal. 



CHAPTER XXII. 

FEANCE IN THE EAST. 



It is no longer possible to see the Pyramids or even Heli- 
opolis in the solitary and solemn fashion in which they should 
be approached. English " going out " and " coming home " 

«e there at all days and hours, and the hundreds of Arabs 
lling German coins and mummies of English manufacture 
are terribly out of place upon the desert. I went alone to see 
the Sphinx, and, sitting down on the sand, tried my best to 
read the riddle of the face and to look through the rude carv- 
ing into the inner mystery ; but it would not do, and I came 
away bitterly disappointed. In this modern democratic rail- 
way-girt world of ours the ancient has no place; the huge 



540 Gkeater Britain. 

Pyramids ma;^ remain forever, but we can no longer read 
thcni. A few months may see a cafe chantant at their base. 

Cairo itself is no pleasant sight. An air of dirt and deg- 
radation hangs over the whole town, and clings to its peo- 
ple, from the donkey-boys and comfit-sellers to the pipe-smok- 
ing soldiers and the money-changers who squat behind their 
trays. The wretched fellaheen, or Egyptian peasantry, are 
apparently the most miserable of human beings, and their 
slouching shamble is a sad sight after the superb gait of the 
Hindoos. The slave-market of Cairo has done its work ; in- 
deed, it is astonishing that the English should content them- 
selves with a treaty in which the abolition of slavery in Egypt 
is decreed, and not take a single step to secure its execution, 
while the slave-market in Cairo continues to be all but open 
to the passer. That the Egyptian Government could put 
down slavery if it had the will can not be doubted by those 
who have witnessed the rapidity with which its officers act in 
visiting doubtful crimes upon the wrong men. During my 
week's stay in Alexandria two such cases came to my notice : 
in the first, one of my fellow-passengers unwittingly insulted 
two of the Albanian police, and was shot at by one of them 
with a long pistol. A number of Englishmen, gathering from 
the public gaming-houses on the great square, rescued him, 
and beat off the cavasses, and the next morning marched 
down to their consulate and demanded justice. Our acting 
consul went straight to the head of the police, laid the case 
before him, and procured the condemnation oi the man who 
shot to the galleys for ten years, while the policeman who had 
looked on was immediately bastinadoed in the presence of the 
passenger. The other case was one of robbery at a desert vil- 
lage from the tent of an English traveller. When he com- 
plained to the sheik the order was given to bastinado the head 
men, and hold them responsible for the amount. The h^Mj^ 
men in turn gave the stick to the householders, and claimed 
the sum from them ; while these bastinadoed the vagrants, and 
actually obtained from them the money. Every male inhab- 
itant having thus received the stick, it is probable that the 
actual culprit was reached, if, indeed, he lived within the vil- 
lage. " Stick-backsheesh " is a great institution in Egypt, but 
the Turks are not far behind. When the British Consulate 



France in the East. 541 

at Bussorah was attacked by thieves some years ago our con- 
sul telegraphed the fact to the Pacha of Bagdad. The answer 
came at once : " Bastinado forty men " — and bastinadoed they 
were, as soon as they had been selected at random from the 
population. 

Coming to Egypt from India the Englishman is inclined to 
believe that, while our Indian Government is an averagely suc- 
cessful despotism, Egypt is misgoverned in an extraordinary 
degree. As a matter of fact, however, it is not fair to the 
King of Egypt that we should compare his rule with ours in 
India, and it is probable that his government is not on the 
whole worse than Eastern despotisms always are. Setting up 
as a " civilized ruler," the King of Egypt performs the duties 
of his position by buying guns which he uses in putting down 
insurrections which he has fomented and yachts for which he 
has no use ; and he appears to think that he has done all that 
Peter of Russia himself could have accomplished when he 
sends a young Egyptian to* Manchester to learn the cotton- 
trade, or to London to acquire the principles of foreign com- 
merce, and on his return to Alexandria sets him to manage 
the soap-works or to conduct the vice-regal band. The aping 
of the forms of " Western civilization," which in Egypt means 
French vice, makes the court of Alexandria look worse than 
it is : we expect the slave-market and the harem in the East, 
but the King of Egypt superadds the Trianon and a bad imi- 
tation of Mabile. 

The court influence shows itself in the actions of the peo- 
ple, or rather the influence at work upon the court is pressing 
also upon the people. For knavery no place can touch the 
modern Alexandria. One word, however, is far from describ- 
ing all the infamies of the city. It surpasses Cologne for 
smells, Benares for pests, Saratoga for gaming, Paris itself for 
vice. There is a layer of French " civilization " of the worst 
kind over the semi-barbarism of Cairo ; but still the town is 
chiefly Oriental. Alexandria, on the other hand, is completely 
Europeanized, and has a white population of seventy or eighty 
thousand. The Arabs are kept in a huge village outside the 
fortifications, and French is the only language spoken in the 
shops and hotels. Alexandria is a French town. 

It is evident enough that the Suez Canal scheme has been 



542 Greater Britaiist. 

from the beginning a blind for the occupation of Egypt by 
France, and that, however interesting to the shareholders may 
be the question of its physical or commercial success, the probr 
abilities of failure have had but Httle weight with the French 
Government. The foundation of the Messagerie Company 
with national capital, to carry imaginary mails, secured the 
preponderance of French influence in the towns of Egypt, and 
it is not certain that we should not look upon the occupation 
of Saigon itself as a mere blind. 

Of the temporary success of the French policy there can be 
no doubt : the English railway-guards have lately been dismiss- 
ed from the Government railway line, and a huge tricolor 
floats from the entrance to the new docks at Suez, while a still 
more gigantic one waves over the hotel ; the King of Egypt, 
glad to find a third Power which he can play off when neces- 
sary, against both England and Russia, takes shares in the. ca- 
nal. It is. when we ask, "What is the end that the French 
have in view ?" that we find it strangely small by the side of 
the means. The French of the present day appear to have no 
foreign policy, unless it is a sort of desire to extend the empire 
of their language, their dance-tunes, and their fashions ; and 
the natural wish of their ruler to engage in no enterprise that 
will outlast his life prevents their having any such permanent 
policy as that of Russia or the United States. An Egyptian 
Pacha hardly put the truth too strongly when he said, " There 
is nothing permanent about France except Mabile." 

The Suez Canal is being pushed with vigor, although the 
labor of the hundreds of Greek and Italian navvies is very 
different to that of the tens of thousands of impressed fellah- 
een. The withdrawal from the Company of the forced la- 
bor of the peasants has demonstrated that the king is at heart 
not well-disposed toward the scheme, for the remonstrances 
of England have never prevented the employment of slave-la- 
bor upon works out of which there was money to be made 
for the vice-regal purse. The difficulty of clearing and keep- 
ing clear the channel at Port Said, at the Mediterranean end, 
is well known to the Pacha and his engineers : it is not diffi- 
cult, indeed, to cut through the bar, nor impossible to keep the 
cutting open, but the effect of the great piers will merely be 
to push the Nile silt farther seaward, and again and again new 



France in the East. 543 

bars will form in front of tlie canal. That the canal is phys- 
ically possible no one doubts, but it is hard to believe that it 
can pay. Even if we suppose, moreover, that the canal will 
prove a complete success, the French Government will only 
find that it has spent millions upon digging a canal for En- 
gland's use. 

The neutralization of Egypt has lately been proposed by 
writers of the Comtist school, but to what end is far from 
clear. "The interests of civilization" are the pretext, but 
when summoned by a Comtist " civilization" and " humanity " 
generally appear in a French shape. Were we to be attacked 
in India by the French or Russians, no n^tralization would 
prevent our sending our troops to India by the shortest road, 
and fighting wherever we thought best. If we were not so 
attacked, neutralization, as far as we are concerned, would be 
a useless ceremony. If France goes beyond her customary 
meddlesomeness and settles down in Egypt we shall evidently 
have to dislodge her, but to neutralize the country would be 
to settle her there ourselves. It would be idle to deny that 
the position of France in the East is connected with the claim 
put forth by her to the moral leadership of the world. The 
" chief power of Europe " and "leader of Christendom" must 
needs be impatient of the dominance of America in the Pacif- 
ic and of Britain in the East, and seeks by successes on the 
side of India to bury the memories of Mexico. One of the 
hundred " missions of France," one of the thousand " imperial 
ideas," is the " regeneration of the East." Treacherous En- 
gland- is to be confined to her single island, and barbarous 
Russia to be shut up in the Siberian snows. England may be 
left to answer for herself, but before we surrender even Russia 
to the Comtist priests we should remember that, just as the 
Russian despotism is dangerous to the world from the stupid- 
ity of its barbarism, so the French democracy is dangerous 
through its feverish sympathies, blundering " humanity," and 
unlimited ambition. 

The present reaction against exaggerated nationalism is in 
itself a sign that our national mind is in a healthy state : but 
while we distrust nationalism because it is illogical and nar- 
row, we must remember that " cosmopolitanism " has been 
made the excuse for childish absurdities and a cloak for des- 



544 Gkeater Britain. 

perate schemes. Love of race among the English rests upon 
a firmer base than either love of mankind or love of Britain, 
for it reposes upon a subsoil of things known — the ascertain- 
ed virtues and powers of the English people. For nations 
such as France and Spain, with few cares outside their Eu- 
ropean territories, national fields for action are, perhaps, too 
narrow, and the interests of even the vast territories inhabited 
by the English race may, in a less degree, be too small for 
English thought ; but there is India — and the responsibility 
of the absolute government of a quarter of the human race is 
no small thing. If we strive to advance ourselves in the love 
of truth, to act JBstly toward Ireland, and to govern India 
aright, we shall have enough of work to occupy us for many 
years to come, and shall leave a greater name in history than 
if we concerned ourselves with settling the affairs of Poland. 
If we need a wider range for our sympathies than that which 
even India will supply we may find it in our friendships with 
the other sections of the race ; and if, unhappily, one result of 
the present awakening of England to free life should be a re- 
turn of the desire to meddle in the affairs of other folk we 
shall find a better outlet for our energy in aiding our Teuton- 
ic brethren in their struggle for unity than in assisting Impe- 
rial France to spread Benoitonisme through the world. 

We can not, if we would, be indifferent spectators of the 
extravagances of France : if she is at present weak in the 
East, she is strong at home. At this moment we are spend- 
ing ten or fifteen millions a year in order that we may be equal 
with her in military force, and we hang upon the words of her 
ruler to know whether we are to have peace or war. Although 
it may not be wise for us to declare that this humiliating spec- 
tacle shall shortly have an end, it is at least advisable that we 
should refrain from aiding the French in their professed en- 
deavors to obtain for other peoples liberties which, they are 
incapable of preserving for themselves. 

If the English race has a " mission " in the world it is the 
making it impossible that the peace of mankind on earth should 
depend upon the will of a single man. 



The English. 545 



• CHAPTER XXIII. 

THE ENGLISH. 

In America we have seen the struggle of the dear races 
against the cheap — the endeavors of the English to hold their 
own against the Irish and Chinese. In New Zealand we found 
the stronger and more energetic race pushing fi-om the earth 
the shrewd and laborious descendants of the Asian Malays ; 
in Australia the English triumphant, and the cheaper races 
excluded from the soil not by distance merely but by arbitrary 
legislation; in India we saw the solution of the problem of 
the officering of the cheaper by the dearer race. Everywhere 
we have found that the difficulties which impede the progress 
to universal dominion of the English people lie in the conflict 
with the cheaper races. The result of our survey is such as 
to give us reason for the belief that race distinctions will long 
continue; that miscegenation will go but little way toward 
blending races ; that the dearer are, on the whole, likely to de- 
stroy the cheaper people, and that Saxondom will rise triumph- 
ant from the doubtful struggle. 

The countries ruled by a race whose very scum and out- 
casts have founded empires in every portion of the globe even 
now consist of 9 J millions of square miles, and contain a popu- 
lation of 300 millions of people. Their surface is five times 
as great as that of the Empire of Darius, and four and a half 
times as large as the Roman Empire at its greatest extent. 
It is no exaggeration to say that in power the English coun- 
tries would be more than a match for the remaining nations 
of the world, whom in the intelligence of their people and the 
extent and wealth of their dominions they already consider- 
ably surpass. Russia gains ground steadily, we are told, but 
so do we. If we take maps of the English-governed countries 
and of the Russian countries of fifty years ago, and compare 
them with the English and Russian countries of to-day, we 
find that the Saxon has outstripped the Muscovite in conquest 
and in colonization. The extensions of the United States alone 
are equal to all those of Russia* Chili, La Plata, and Peru 



546 Greater Britain. 

must eventually become English : the Red Indian race that 
now occupies those countries can not stand against our colo- 
nists ; and the future of the table-lands of Africa and that of 
Jajoan and of China is as clear. Even in the tropical plains 
the negroes alone seem able to withstand us. No possible 
series of events can prevent the English race itself in 1970 
numbering 300 millions of beings — of one national character 
and one tongue. Italy, Spain, France, Russia become pigmies 
by the side of such a people. 

Many who are well aware of the power of the English na- 
tions are nevertheless disposed to believe that our own is 
morally, as well as physically, the least powerful of the sec- 
tions of the race, or, in other words, that we are overshadow- 
ed by America and Australia. The rise to power of our south- 
ern colonies is, however, distant, and an alliance between our- 
selves and America is still one to be made on equal terms. 
Although we are forced to contemplate the speedy loss of our 
manufacturing supremacy as coal becomes cheaper in Ameri- 
ca and dearer in Old England, we have nevertheless as much 
to bestow on America as ^he has to confer on us. The pos- 
session of India offers to ourselves that element of vastness of 
dominion which, in this age, is needed to secure width of 
thought and nobility of purpose ; but to the English race our 
possession of India, of the coasts of Africa, and of the ports 
of China offers the possibility of planting free institutions 
among the dark-skinned races of the world. 

The ultimate future of any one section of our race, however, 
is of little moment by the side of its triumph as a whole, but 
the power of English laws and English principles of govern- 
ment is not merely an English question — its continuance is 
essential to the freedom of mankind. 

Steaming up from Alexandria along the coast of Crete and 
Arcadia, and through the Ionian Archipelago, I reached Brin- 
disi, and thence pas-sed on through Milan toward home. This 
is the route that our Indian mails should take until the Eu- 
phrates road is made. 



APPENDIX. 



A MAORI DINNER. 

For those who would make trial of Maori dishes, here is a native 
biU of fare, such as can be imitated in the south of England : 

HAKARI MAORI— A MAORI FEAST. 
BILL OF FARE. 

SOUP. 
KoTA KoTA Any shell-fish. 

FISH. 

Inanga Whitebait (boiled in milk, with leeks). 

PiHABAu Lamprey (stewed). 

Tuna Eels (steamed). 

MADE DISHES. 

PuKEKO Moor-hen (steamed). 

KouRA,.... Craw-fish (boiled). 

Tm Tui Thrush (boiled). 

K^BEEU Pigeon (baked in clay). 

EOAST. 
PoOKA Pork (short pig). 

GAME. 
Paeera Wild duck (roasted on embers). 

VEGETABLES. 

Paukena Pumpkin. 

Kamu Kamu Vegetable Marrow. 

Kaputi Cabbage (steamed). 

KuMATA Sweet Potatoes. 

SWEETS. 

Tatar AMOA Cranberries (steamed). 

Taua Damsons (steamed with sugar). 

DESSERT. 

Karamu Currants. 

PiKAKAUiKA, Dec, 1S65. 



INDEX. 



Aborigines, American treatment of, con- 
trasted with Engliah, 9T, 98 ; extirpation 
o^ in Tasmania, 343 ; liostility of English 
military to, 344 ; contempt of the settlers 
for, 345. 

Acapulco (see Mexico). 

Adelaide, 354 ; climate of, S54 ; curious fact 
relating to wheat trade,355 ; "• the farinace- 
ous village, so-called by Victorians,*' 355; 
character of the buildings, dress, and peo- 
ple, 355; the bay of, at early morning, 362. 

Agra (see India — Mohammedan Cities). 

Alabama claims, feeling of Americans re- 
specting, 216; their opinion of England's 
refusal to arbitrate on the entire question, 
216-218. 

Albany (see Convict). 

Alexandria, a French town, 5J1 (see also 
French in Egypt). 

Allahabad (see India — Mohammedan Cities). 

Alleghanies, eastern and western slopes of, 84. 

America, wear and tear of life in, 50 ; in-door 
life of children, 50 ; unhealthiness of tilling 
virgin soil, etc, 51 ; politics discarded by 
the most intellectual men in the slave-rul- 
ing days, 52, 53 ; new map of the States, 

, 62 ; splendid appropriations for education- 
al purposes, 74 (see Pacific Railroad ; rail- 
ways preceding population, 80 ; Noi-th 

'. America, conformation of, as compai'ed 
with other continents, 84 ; American 
Bcenery, 165; difficulty of forming an idea 
of America, 220 ; apparent Latinization of, 
221 ; power of, now predominant in the Pa- 
cific, 281 ; democracy of, diflferent from that 
of Australia, 314; social difference, 314. 

American Desert, the, 1 06 ; alkali dust, 106, 
140, 152 ; highwaymen, 152. 

Union, not likely to fall to pieces, 199 ; 

tendency of the time to great powers, not 
small ones, 199 ; interest of all the States 
in union, 199, 200 ; real danger from the 
seizure of the Atlantic coast cities by the 
Irish, 200 ; sliape of North America, render- 
ing almost impossible the existence of dis- 
tinctive peoples within it, 223. 

American opinion of Great Britain, France, 
and Russia, 201 ; of the Fenians and Irish 
complaints, 215 ; the Alabavia claims, 216. 

parties. Republican and Democratic, 

204-206 ; radical watchfulness needed to 
guard the country against great dangers, 
206 ; great issue involved in the struggle 
between the parties, 20T ; possibility of the 
future abolition of the Presidency, 208. 



American sensitiveness to English opinion, 
218 ; an instance of the injustice done to 
Americans during lhewar,219; their firm- 
ness while the Trent affair was pending, 
219. 

Ann Arbor Institute, men sent by it to the 
war, 74 ; officers returned to complete their 
studies, 74. 

Artemus Ward, joke of, to Elder Stenhouse, 
118 ; in Virginia City, 148. 

Atlantic States of America (see Western 
States). 

Attar-of-roses (see India— Umritsur). 

Auckland, effect on, of the banana-tree, 33 
(see also Australia and Rival Colonies). 

Aurora, in California, 154. 

Austin, the pleasures and immunities of a 
Western tour, 143-145; Cliinese quarter 
of, 144; a farewell " swop," 145. 

Australasia, misuse of the term in England, 
2S3 (see also Rival Colonies) ; youth of Aus- 
tralia and their future, 286 ; climate of, 
286; eager democracy of, 286; different 
from the republicanism of the United 
States, 286 (see Coal) ; poetic native 
names, 305 ; social differences between 
Australia and America, 314 ; prospects of, 
3T3 ; progress and extent of, 373, 374 ; ob- 
stacles to the peopling of the whole of, 374 ; 
want of raili-oads, 374 ; small amount of 
agricultural land as compared with extent 
of territory, 375; moral and intellectual 
health of, 375 ; love of mirth, and absence 
of the American downrightness, etc., in 
pursuit of truth, 375; waste of food, 375; 
manners, etc., 376; dress, 376; imitation 
of home customs, 376 ; University of Syd- 
ney, 376 ; its Conservatism as distinguish- 
ed from the Radicalism of the Western 
Universities, 377. 

Australia, rivalry of the colonies of, 81. 

, West (see Convicts). 

, South, probability of becoming the 



granaiy of the Pacific colonies, 355 ; pro- 
duction of wheat, 359; the land system, 
358 (see Women, 358, 360); Scotch and 
German immigrants, 360 ; political life of 
the colony, 361 ; expedition to fix a new 
capital for the northern territory, 361 ; pos- 
sibility that the North may be found a land 
of gold, 362 ; from South to West Australia, 
363. 



BALT.AEAT (see Victorian Ports). 
Ballot (see Tasmania). 



650 



Index. 



Banana-tree, injurious effect of, in affording 
food without labor in the Southern States 
of America, Panama, Ceylon, Mexico, 
Auckland, etc., 32, 33 ; a devil's agent, 32 ; 
its danger to Florida and Louisiana, 33. 

Benares (see India) . 

Bendigo (see Sandhurst). 

Benita, Cape, 180. 

Bentham, his philosophy in Utah, 112. 

Bhawulpore (see India — Native States). 

Black Mountains (see Rocky Mountains), 105. 

Bombay (see India — Bombay). 

Boston, its Elizabethan English and old En- 
glish names, 54; its readiness during the 
war, 55. 

Brannan, the chief mover in repressing dis- 
orders by Lynch law in California, 109 ; 
his speech to his fellow-citizens, ITO. 

Brigham Young, Elder Evans, the " Shak- 
er's," opinion of, 110 ; conversation of three 
hours with, 111; his blessing at parting, 
111 ; " Is Brigham sincere?" Ill ; his posi- 
tion as a Prophet, while in fact a Utilita- 
rian deist, 112; his practical revelations, 
112; and manner of announcing them, 112 ; 
his definition of the highest inspiration, 
113; his position among his people, 113; 
his immense personal influence, 114 ; his 
sons sent out each to work his own w^fiy in 
the world, 131. 

Brisbane (see Queensland). 

Broadbrim, the mark of the Southern guer- 
rilla, 18. 

Buffalo herds on the plains, 89 ; skeletons of, 
80, 

Brffalo town, gloom of, 68. 

Buller, the (see Hokitika). 



C. 



Cairo, du-t and degradation of, 540; slave- 
market,540 ; punishment byselection,540; 
misgoverament of the country, 541 (see also 
French in Egypt). 

Calcutta (see India), 

California and Nevada, rectification of fron- 
tiers of, 154. 

California, the terms Golden State and El 
Dorado well applied to, 157 ; scenery, 157 ; 
names given to places by diggers,160 ; lux- 
ury, etc., 162 (see Lynch Law) ; Episcopa- 
lianism flourishing in, 186; its prospects in 
the Pacific, 186 ; nitro-glycerine, the night- 
mare of, 187 ; the valley of, 188 ; position 
of, on the overland route to tlie Pacific, 195 ; 
extent of, 195 ; climate, 195. 

Californian celebrities, portraits of, 147. 

Cambridge, Mass, (see Harvard). 

Canada, 57 (see Quebec) ; religion and poli- 
tic3,61 ; disunion of French and Irish Cath- 
olic?, 61 ; French support of the Confeder- 
ation scheme, 61 ; Fenians in, 61 ; need of 
British Columbia to the Confederation, 61 ; 
difficulties in the way of real confedera- 
tion, 63 ; emigration to, 63 ; emigration 
from, to the United States, 64 ; jealousy of 
the Canadian States, 64 ; their dislike to 
America, 65 ; difficulty of defending, 65 ; 
protective duties, 65 ; advantages of inde- 
pendence, 60 ; narrowness of English views 
respecting, 67 ; belief of the Canadians 



that they possessed the only possible road 
to China for the trade of the future, 76 
(see Pacific Railroad). 

Canterbury, New Zealand, Episcopalian coU 
ony, 243 ; province of, divided both politi- 
cally and geographically, 243 ; antagonism 
between the Christchurch apople and the 
diggers, 243 ; dignified Episcopalian char- 
acter of Christchurch, 245 ; its importation 
of rooks from England to caw in the elm- 
trees of the cathedral close, while Hokitika 
imports men, 245. 

Capital, future, of the United States, 85. 

Carolina, North, crackers, 19, 

Cartier, early explorer, 75. 

Cashmere (see India — Colonization and Na- 
tive States). 

Caste, assailed by railways and telegi-aph, 
408 ; difficulty of discovering the opinion 
of a Hindoo, 415 ; idea of good manners, 
416 ; the secret history of the great rebel- 
lion, 416 ; British ignorance of the real feel- 
ing of the people, 416 ; census as viewed 
by the Hindoos, 417 ; its revelations with 
respect to caste and " callings," 417, 418; 
beggars, 418; superstition, 419; a play at 
demonology, 419 ; the praying-wheel, 419 ; 
a saint's privileges in the days of the Em- 
peror Akbar, 420 ; strength of caste, 421 ; 
missionaries and Hindoo reformers, 421, 
422 ; Hindoo deists, 423 ; Christians, 423 ; 
different position of native Catholics and 
Protestants, 424 ; fewness of native Chris- 
tians, -424; infanticide, 424, 425; remark-, 
able changes in the last few years, 425; 
progress of the spirit of Christianity, 425, 

•Catholicism not "fashionable" in America, 
186. 

Caucus, Kiiig, 211 ; Americans, on the deri- 
vation of the term, 211. 

Cawnpore (see India — Mo'Wammedan Cities), 

Cemeteries, Hollywood, Richmond, 27 ; Lone 
Mountain Cemeteiyin Clalifornia, the most 
beautiful in America, 181 ; other American 
cemeteries, 181. 

Census, curious results of, in India, 416-418. 

Centre, government from the, 82 ; ancient 
and modem views of, 82, 83; centre of 
United States, 85. 

Ceylon (see Kandy). 

Ceylon, Maritime, 386 ; the streets of Point 
du Galle, 388; women and men of, 388; 
mixture of races, 388 ; American mission- 
aries, quaint humor of, 388 ; beggars, 388 ; 
gem and jewel sellers, trade in precious 
stones, 38;J ; British soldiers in white, 389 ; 
heat at night, 390 ; the morning gun, 390 ; 
character of the Cinghalese, 391 ; trans- 
lucent water, and brilliance of color at the 
bottom, 391; a Cinghalese dinner, 392; 
a stage-coach lide to Colombo, 392 ; aspect 

, of the fine road, crowded with all ranks of 
the people, 392 ; one continuous village, 
393 ; dense population and food of the peo- 
ple on the coast, 393 ; Colombo, 393 ; trees 
and foliage, 393 ; a garden scene, 394 ; 
fort, or "European town" of, 394; the 
most graceful street in the world, 394 ; the 
peak where Adam mourned his son a hun- 
dred years, 394 ; Ceylon Coffee Company's 
Establishment, 394 ; steam factory, 394 ; 
French Catholic priests, 395 ; their success. 



Index. 



551 



395; the old Dutch quarter, 395; rapid" 
clianges from heat to cold, 396. 

Chaudiere Falls (Ottawa), 67. 

Chicago (see San Francisco and Chicago, etc.). 

Chickahominy, the scene of M''Clellan'3 de-> 
feat, 23. 

China, coolies from, in the Southern States 
of America, 82 ; '' one man and a China- 
man," 1S8 ; a Chinese theatre, 189 ; pe- 
culiarity of its drama, 189 ; the second 
month and third act of the play, ISO ; a 
Chinese restaurant, 190 ; saucer and chop- 
sticks for the author, 190 ; gaming-houses, 
191; Chinese industry and cleanliness, 
192 ; similarity of faces common to all 
colored races, 192; benevolent societies, 
192 ; wealth of merchants, 193 ; prejudice 
against on the part of Americans, as also 
on that of the Australians, 193; Chinese 
expostulations against the prejudice, 193 ; 
cowardice of, 193^ practical slavery in 
California, 193 ; the Irish of Asia, 194 ; 
capability for work, 194; the serious side 
of the Chinese problem, 194. 

Chinese, first arrival among, 144 ; in Cali- 
fornia, 159 ; a tiny Chinese theatre, 159 ; 
as tax-payers, 160 (see China); at Mel- 
bourne, 293 ; at Sandhurst, 301 ; anti-Chi- 
nese mobs, 301; unjust treatment of, 301, 
302 ; hunted with bloodhounds, 302 ; mar- 
riage between, and Irish women, 302; 
character of, as citizens in Australia, 302 ; 
restaurants of, 302; in the Australian la- 
bor-market, 332-334. 

Churches, in America, Catholic and Episco- 
palian, 186, 224 ; Spiritualists and Unita- 
rians, 225 ; Shakers and Communists, 225 ; 
Mormons, 225 ; Radical Unitarians, 225 ; 
tenets and claims of the Spiritualists, 226 ; 
the Spiritual Clarion^ 226 ; rumored num- 
ber of Spiritualists in America, 226 ; the 
Gennans mostly pure Materialists, 226 
(see also Canterbury, Otago, and New Zea- 
land) ; Catholics, in Australia, 312 ; " god- 
less education," 313; Churches in Victoria 
nearly all of the well-known English names, 
318; absence of the American names, 318 ; 
dignity of character arising from the 
American religious feeling, 318^ Australian 
churches, 377; Hindoo churches, English 

■ and native, 421 ; Church of the Hindoo 
Deists, 415-425; a Sikh revival, 466; 
Parsee religion, 512. 

Cincinnati, smoke of, 68. 

Civilization, limits of Westward, 86; "civ- 
ilization means whisky," 86. 

Coal (see Pacific), in New South Wales, 292 ; 
its importance to Australia, 292 ; value to 
Sydney, 293. 

Coalville, the Mormon Newcastle, 109. 

Cocoas, Island of, kingdom of John Eqss, 336. 

Colonial Government (see Squatter and De- 
mocracy). 

Colonies, taxation of England in aid of 
wealthy, 379 ; of Canada, 380 ; exclusion 
of English productions from, 380 ; cost to 
England, 380 ; refusal of the, to contribute 
toward the cost of imperial wars, 380 ; 
readiness of the old American colonists to 
do so, 380 ; position of imperial soldiers in 
the colonies, 381 ; absurdity of supposing 
that the Australians would be in danger if 



separated from England, 381 ; our defense 
of, necessarily of least value when most 
needed, 382 ; and really a source of weak- 
ness to the colonies, 382 ; separation no 
loss to England, 382; trade with Canada 
and with the United States of America, 
383 ; with Egypt, 383 ; question of the out- 
let for population, 383 ; strength of great 
and small states, 383 ; the question of col- 
onies preventing the insularity of mind 
that might belong to a nation of a limited 
area, 384 ; separation not to be desired if 
union can be continued on fair terms to the 
mother-land, and with advantage to the 
colonies, 384, 385 ; if not so, separation not 
dangerous to either, 385. 

Coloradan farm, 91 ; a Coloradan boast, 94 ; 
Coloradan "boys" a fine handsome race, 
103 ; strange insects, 104. 

Colorado, rival Governors of, 92 ; great idea 
of Gilpin the Pioneer, 92; extent and 
beauty of country, 101, 103; Upper Colo- 
rado, or Green River, lost for a thousand 
miles in undiscovered wilds, 107. 

Columbo (see Ceylon, Maritime.) 

Conservative, Colonial, what is a, SOT (see 
Squatters). 

Convicts (see Tasmania), settlement of South 
Australia, 363 ; petition to be made a pe- 
nal settlement, 363; convicts or emanci- 
pists in the colony, 364 ; population of West 
Australia, 364; convict escapes, 364; pun- 
ishment, 364 ; " bolters for a change," 365 ; 
murder to escape convict labor, 365 ; trans- 
portation, past and present, 365, 366; en- 
tire colonies formed of convicts, 366 ; "so- 
ciety " at Botany Bay, 866 ; all professions, 
etc. filled by convicts, 366 ; petition against 
transportation from Tasmania, 306 ; fear- 
ful demoralization of the colony, 367 ; free 
female laborers sent out, 368 ; the assign- 
ment system, 368; crime in the colony, 
369 ; bush-rangers, 369 ; end of the system, 
369 ; demoralization of the convict voyage, 
370 ; horrid conversation, 370 ; the hope 
that Tasmania may be purified by the gold- 
find and free selection, 370 ; the transpor- 
tation system, 371 ; its cost, 371 ; its sever- 
ity to the least guilty, 371 ; the future of 
convict treatment, 371, 372. 

Co-operative labor, negro {see Davis). 

Costa Rica, 220. 

Cumberland and il/crn'wiac, wrecks of, 18. 



D. 



Danites, 113 ; Porter Rockwell, chief of,135 ; 
strange stories of, 135; bands organized 
to defend the first Presidency of the Mor- 
mons, 136 ; their reported deeds, 136. 

Davidson, Mount, Nevada,* 150 ; its silver 
mines, 150, 151. 

Davis, Joseph (brother of Jefferson Davis), 
scheme of, for negro co-operative labor, 
35. 

Deseret (the Jlormon countiy), "Land of the 
Bee," 125. 

Devil's Gate, Nevada, 151. 

Diego Mendoza's discovery of California, 
157. 

Dirt-storm, 90. 



552 



Index. 



Democracy (see Squatters), colonial, 312; 
payment of members, 312; reasons for, 
312; the Catholic party in power, 312; 
driven from office on the question of ap- 
pointing only Irishmen to the police, 313 ; 
the O'Shaiighnessey Government, 313; 
Victorians mending the constitution, 314 ; 
democracy of Victoria not American but 
English in tone, 314; difference between 
the democracy of Victoria and New South 
Wales, 316 ; earnestness of colonial democ- 
racy in the cause of education, 316 ; dan- 
ger of the crushing influence of democracy 
upon individuality, 318 ; no great party in 
the colonies at all like the great Republi- 
can party of America, 319; the future of 
Australian democracv, 319; tendency of 
the women to cling to the old "colonial 
court " society, 319 ; democratic principles 
in Australia, 320. 

Denver, letter from, 86 ; Vigilance Commit- 
tees in, 178. 

Dependencies, English, 535; Abyssinian war, 
535 ; free trade forced on China and Japan, 
535 ; future policy of England and Ameri- 
ca with respect to China, 536 ; profit and 
loss of our dependencies, 537; the Dutch 
system, 537 ; deliberately rejected by the 
English people, 537 ; cost of several depen- 
dencies, 537 ; India's part in the Abysin- 
nian war, 537 ; the retention of dependen- 
cies and colonies on different grounds, 537; 
India as a nursery of warriors and states- 
men, 538 ; the advantage to a nation of 
having world-wide interests to govern, 
638; seizure of Perira, 538 ; amusing in- 
cident of, 538. 

Dixon, Mr. Hepworth, meeting with, at St. 
Louis, 81 ; name in Nebraska, 104 ; part- 
ing from the author, 134. 

Drama, Chinese, peculiarity of, 189. 

Dutch element of population gone from New 
York, 41. 

Dutch Gap, 21. 



East, the, first view of, 372. 

Education, "^godless," in Australia, 313; 
earnestness of the colonial democracy in the 
cause of, 316, 317 ; the Australian as com- 
pared with the English view of the real 
use of, 317 ; illiterate men in the colonies 
striving to educate their children, 317. 

El Dorado, 156-159. 

Emerson, his opinion of the vitality of Mor- 
monism, 133. 

Emigrants, classes of, that do not succeed, 
and that do, 290; tendency to hang about 
great towns in America and Australia, 293. 

English, old, names in the Southern States 
of America, 25, 26 ; and families, 26 ; in 
Boston, 54 ; flowers at the New Zealand 
diggings, 236 ; officers at the New Zealand 
diggings, 241. 

English race, pushing on toward the setting 
sun, 198 (see Race in America) ; in the 
sti'uggle of races, 545 ; extent of districts 
ruled by the English race, 545 ; the Saxon 
has outstripped the Muscovite, 545; alli- 
ance on equal terms with America, 545; 
prospects of the race as a whole, 515. 



Episcopalian Church hi America, flourishing, 
186. 



F» 



Fenian Brothers, the, 213 ; meetings of, in 
New York, Chicago, and Canada, 213 ; 
Irish support of, 213 ; nature of Irish an- 
tipathy to Great Britain, 213; its probable 
effect, 213 ; the Irish at home not Fenians 
in the American sense, 214; land laws in 
Ireland, 214; unsatisfactoiy position of 
Irishmen in America, 214; Fenian agree- 
ment to drop the word " English " as ap- 
plied to language, and to use only the term 
"American," 215; opinion of Americans 
respecting Fenianism, 215; the raid into 
Canada and the St. Alban's raid, 216; Fe- 
nian power owing to the anti-English feel- 
ing of the Democratic party and the Ala- 
bama claims, 216. 

Flies, the two, 273 ; probable cause of English 
natural productions supplanting the Maori 
ones in New Zealand, 273-274 ; the English 
fly beats down and will exterminate the Ma- 
ori fly, 274 ; suitability of the New Zealand 
soil and climate for English productions — 
men, seeds, and insect-germs, 274; the 
Maori differs from other aboriginal races — 
he fanns, owns villages and ships, is a good 
rider, mechanic, soldier, sailor, and trader, 
yet he is passing away like the native fly, 
275 ; the descendants of Captain Cook's 
pigs, 276 ; conduct of the British Govern- 
ment- toward the Maories, 276, 277 (see 
Thompson, "William) ; half-breeds, 278 ; a 
chance for the Maories surviving by mis- 
cegenation, 278 ; unchastity of the Maori 
unmarried women, "Christian as well as 
heathen," 279 (see also Pacific). 

Florida, banana in, 33. 

Florida, privateer, under water, 20. 

Forged notes, novel agreement of Colorado 
and Nevada people respecting, 149. 

Freedom and slavery, their contrary effects, 
24. 

Free labor and slave labor, 29, 30. 

Freemasonry of travel, 143. 

Freemont, the Pathfinder, his report of Utah, 
110; his conquest in the West, 180. 

French, attempt of, to precede us in New 
Zealand and Australia, 351 ; possessions 
in India, 406; the Island of Perim, 538; 
France in the East, 539; state of Egypt, 
540, 541 ; preponderance of French influ- 
ence there, 541 ; the Suez Canal, 541 ; its 
commercial success not of first importance 
to the French Government, 542; French 
power played off by the King of Egypt 
against England and Russia, 542 ; pros- 
pects of the canal, 543; and use to En- 
gland, 543; proposed neutralization of 
Egypt, 543 ; French aims in Egypt, 543 ; 
Comtist theories, 543 ; nationalism and cos- 
mopolitanism, 543 ; the work of England 
as distinguiehed from that of France, 644. 



G. 

Galle (see Point du Galle). 
Geeloag (see Victorian Ports). 



Index. 



553 



Germans, justice-loving, their descendants in 
Western America, 175; their influence on 
the religious thought of America, 226. 

Guld and silver diggers, contempt of the 
former for the latter, 151. 

Gold, discovery of, in any part of the world 
certain to be followed by English Govern- 
ment there, ■?^. 

Golden City, 179; seeing the "lions" there, 
179 ; subterranean forces, 182 ; " What 
Cheer House," 182; mint-juleps, 182; do- 
mestic servant!^ their enviable position, 
182 ; hotel life, 182, 183 ; excellency of cli- 
mate, 184 ; gayety of the people, 184 ; mix- 
ed population, 185, 186. 

Golden Gate, the gap in the Contra Costa 
range of mountains by which the Pacific 
breeze rushes on San Francisco, 183 ; ben- 
eficiar eff.'cts of the breeze, 185; curious 
facts couneeted with it, 185. 

Gilpin, Governor, 104, 195. 

Grand Plateau, overtaken on, by a company 
of "• overlanders," 140 ; compliments in the 
desert, 140. 

Grant, General, 21 ; the secret of his success, 
24. 

Great Salt Lake City, 138 ; the lake gradu- 
ally sinking, 130 ; its extent, 155. 

Greeley, Horace, 139-155. 

Guatemala, 220. 

H. 

Hangtown, where Lynch law was inaugura- 
ted, 160. 

Hank Monk's "piece," 155; a reckless drive, 
156. 

Harvard College (Cambridge, Mass.), foun- 
dation of, 47; the Harvard family, 48; de- 
fects of the college, 48 ; its need of a ten 
days' revolution, 48 ; hope of reform, 49 ; 
new constitution, 49; out-door sports, 49, 
51; "Alumni celebration,'' 51; New En- 
gland love for, 52 ; old students, 52 ; past 
reform, 52 ; its noble bands of volunteers 
for the war, 53 ; classic repose of the town, 
53. 

Heights, the, among the "Nameless Alps" 
of Western America, supper on, at 3 A.M., 
139. 

Himalayan yak, its suitability for the desert, 
106. 

Hobarton (see Tasmania). 

Hudson, Captain, his shooting down the sons 
of the last Mogul Emperor, 432. 

Hokitika and the Buller — new gold-fields of 
the colony, 233 ; nature of the voyage from 
Melbourne to Hokitika, 235 ; a fine sun- 
rise, 235; the bar, 235; a "toss" for a 
newspaper, 236 ; the hotel, 233 ; English 
flowers among the diggers, 236 ; the dig- 
ging?, 236 ; soil and climate of, 237 ; polit- 
ical economy on board tlie steamer, 237 ; 
rapid rise of Hokitika, 237 ; its excellent 
roads, 238 ; the product of convict labor, 
238 ; the term " convict " made to include 
persons committed for the smallest offense^, 
238,239; bush-rangers, 239 ; New Zealand 
Th;ig3, 239 ; a favorite amusement at the 
diggings, 241 ; the new road from Hokiti- 
ka, '241 ; riviilry between the town and the 
religious settlements, 244. 



Homestead Act (United States), frauds on, 
177. 

Hotel life in America, its effect on women and 
children, 182, 183; profligacy and assur- 
ance of Young America, 182, 183. 

Hudson Bay Company, the blight of its mo- 
nopoly, 60-62 ; impossibility of the Com- 
pany resisting American immigration, 63. 

Hunting-party, a, lost, 87. 

llydrabad (see India — Scinde). 



I. 



India, spelling of native names, 386. 

, Benares, early morning in, 409 ; the 

Hindoo as a babblei', 410 ; Temple of Sa- 
cred Monkeys, 410 ; Queen's College for 
native students, 410; observatory of Jai 
Singh, and the Golden Temple, 410; 
streets of Benares, 411 ; banks of the Gan- 
ges, 411 ; scenery, 411 ; ornamentation of 
pavilions, 411 ; taste in painting, 412 ; peo- 
ple taken to the banks of the Ganges to 
die, 412 ; similar customs among the Cin- 
ghalese and Maories, 413 ; immorality of the 
holy city, 413 ; consei-vatisni of the Orien- 
tal mind, 413 ; fewness of Europeans in In- 
dia, 413 ; a hot white fog, 413 ; demoraliza- 
tion of English soldiers, 414 ; brandy-and- 
soda- water, 414 ; Benares a type of India, 
415 ; position of missionaries in, 415. 

, Bombay, 508 ; vegetation, 508 ; har- 



bor of, 509 ; weak defenses of, 509 ; rapid 
rise of, owing to the cotton - trade, 509, 
510 ; hard Avork in the mercantile houses, 
510 ; Scotchmen in Bombay, 511 ; compen- 
sations of Bombay life, 511; the bazar, 
511 ; the Parsees, 511 ; their religion and 
culture, 512 ; the stage as a means of sat- 
irizing English foibles, 512 ; a Parsee mar- 
riage, 513 ; Caves of Elephanta, 513 ; bust 
of the Hindoo Trinity, 513 ; its grandeur, 
513. 

-, Calcutta to Benares, etc. 405 ; Chan- 



dernagore, 405; French possessions, 406; 
railway in Oriental dress, 406 ; Monghyr 
Hills, 406; the Ganges, first view of it, 
407; scenery, 407; over the plains, 407; 
Patna, Oriental independence of railway 
time-tables, 407; taking tickets in good 
time, 408 ; working of the railways, 408 ; 
effect of railways on the state of the coun- 
try, 408 ; on caste, 408, 400 ; destruction 
of forests, 409 ; Mogul Serai, the junction 
for Benares, 409 (see Benares). " 

-, Colonization of, 445 ; attempts at. 



made in six districts, 446 ; Cashmere the 
best for European settlers, 446 ; civilians 
.and rulers of India jealous of settlers, 446, 
447; dread of "low-caste" Englishmen, 
447; holding of landed estates by English- 
men in India, 447; English planters would 
assist to give a healthy tone to the social 
system, 448 ; indigo-plantations in Bengal, 
449 ; two securities against the further 
degradation of India, 449. 

-, English learning in, 518 ; ignorance 



of the people, 519 ; their high art a relic of 
a by-gone age, 519 ; apparent rapid de- 
cline since tlie English arrived in India, 
519 ; humiliation of the ruling classes of 



A 2 



664: 



Index. 



the country, 520 ; what should be the char- 
acter of tlie government of such a people, 
521 ; "India for the Indians," the mean- 
ing of the cry, 521 ; necessary radical re- 
forms, 521 ; trivial character of those in- 
troduced a few years ago, 521 ; importance 
of naturalizing the English language in 
India, 521 ; naturalization of the Spanish 
language in America, 522; England's 
want of success in that particular, 522 ; 
early abolition of slavery probably one 
cause of it, 522 ; our system of government 
a dear one, 523 ; servile condition of native 
women, 523; false swearing, 523; small 
amount of money spent in encouraging 
learning, 524. 

India, England in the East different from the 
England at home, 525, 526; trial by jury 
an-1 la\v courts, 526; the old-school Hin- 
doos and the freethinkers both opposed to 
us, 526, 527 ; superiority of Akbar's pol- 
icy, 527; employment of natives in higher 
offices, 527, 528 ; a Mahommedan protest 
against our policy, 528 ; levelling tendency 
of our competitive examinations, 528 ; ha- 
tred to English rule, the hatted that East- 
erns always have to their masters, 5'.'9 ; 
not a wish for salf-government, 529 ; the 
Anglo-Saxon race in possession of the only 
homes of freedom known at the present 
time, 530 ; freedom not understood by the 
Hindoos, 530 ; consequences of our leaving 
India, 531; prospects of our government 
there, 531 ; Anglo-Indian opposition to gov- 
ernment from London, 532, 533 ; the crea- 
tion of new governments, 533 ; fundament- 
al question whether we wish to hold India 
for our prestige merely, or»in the interest 
of the people of Hindostan, 534. 

• , Gazette^ 451; value and variety of 

contents of, 451-453 ; evidence with respect 
to "ghaut-murder," 454; evidence as to 
polyandry and polygyny, in India, 455- 
458. 

, Lahore, 467 ; appearance of, 467 ; 

suburb of tombs, 467; Cabool Gate, 467; 
English characteristics of Lahore, 468 ; 
newspapers of, 468; the rulers of Lahore, 
460. 

Madras to Calcutta, 402; the Mas- 



suUah boat, 402 ; sighting the Temple of 
Juggernauth, 403 ; the Hoogly, 403 ; scen- 
eiy on, 403 ; palace of the ex-King of Oude, 
413 ; extravagance and debauchery of the 
ex-king, 403 ; apprehension of one of his 
wives for assisting in, 403 ; general immo- 
rality of Avealthy natives in Calcutta, 404; 
character of the Indian Government, and 
its influence on the popular life, 404 ; Gov- 
ernment-house, and Calcutta building.?, 
404 ; hospitality of great mercantile hous- 
es, 404, 405 ; mixed population of Calcutta, 
405. 

-, Mohammedan cities of, 425 ; Allaha 



bad, 425 ; Cawnpore, 426 ; Lucknow, 426 ; 
bsauly of Lucknow, 426 ; stories of the 
mutiny, 426, 427 ; ill-treatment of natives 
by the English, 427; a notice in hotels, 
427; Anglo-Indian jokes, 428; looting, 
428 ; contempt for native lives, 428 ; offi- 
cers and natives, 429 ; English cruelties in 
Oudc:, 429; the Residency at Lucknow, 



429; a war, not a rebellion, in Oude, 430; 
rapid repair of the wrecks of the rebellion, 
430 ; Agra, 430 ; the Taj Mahal and Pearl 
of Mosques, 430-432; Akbar's draught- 
board and pieces, 431 ; great works of the 
Mogul conquerors, 432; contrast of Mo- 
hammedan great cities and those of the 
three Presidencies, 432 ; changes in Delhi, 
433. 
India, Mohammedan MohuiTum, celebrated 
at Poonah, 513 ; the ascent to Poonah, 514 ; 
the procession, 515, 51%; elegance and 
grace of the females of Poonah, 516 ; the 
procession joined in l)y the Hindoos and 
Christians as well as Mohammedans, 516, 
517; drunken British soldiers, 517 ; Indian 
Mohammedans, their small number and 
Hindoo feeling.*, 418. 

Native States, 484; resemblance of 



the people of, to Gaelic races, 484 ; need 
of irrigation in country, 484, 485 ; Moultan, 
485; rail and river, 485; State of Bhawul- 
pore, 485 ; talk of annexation of, 486 ; 
demoralization, 486 ; degeneracy of ruling 
families, 487 ; British or native rule, 487 ; 
reasons for believing that the people know 
they are well off under British rule, 488 ; 
merchants and towns-people our friends, 
483; danger of interfering with native 
customs, 483 ; the Nepaulese during the 
mutiny, 489 ; the State of Cashmere, 480 ; 
its creation as a State, 489 ; grounds for 
re-purchase or annexation, 48;^, 490; the 
Nizam, Scindia, Guicodar of Baroda, and 
Holkar, 490 ; origin of present ruling fam- 
ilies, 491 ; effect of shutting out the natives 
fiom the higher branches of the English 
sei-vice, 491, 492; present attitude of the 
natives one of indifference and neutrality, 
492, 493; the question of future annex- 
ation, 493. 

-, our Army, 470 ; tlie Sikhs, 470 ; ques- 



tionable morality of the present system of, 
471 ; Russia our only possible enemy from 
without, 472 ; her weakness as against In- 
dia, 472 ; taxation of the poorest country in 
the world for so large an array, 473 ; our 
duty to reduce the army, 473 ; employment 
of Sikhs out of India, 473 ; British officers, 
474 ; danger to English liberties from so 
large an ariny in India, 474. 

overland routes, 501 ; Kuri'achee, 



character of, 501, 502 ; chokedars, 502 ; a 
shibboleth for excluding natives from the 
lines, 502; the harbor of Kurrachee, 503; 
Kurrachee the direct route from Bombay, 
by the Euphrates Valley and Constantino- 
ple, to London, 503 ; the earliest known 
overland route, 504 ; interest of a return of 
trade to the Gulf route, 504, 505 ; difficul- 
ties in the fl"ay of, 505-507 ; Scindee chief 
tains, 508. 

•, Russian approach to, 475 ; at Bokha- 
ra, 475 ; advice from different quarters as 
to the best means for dealing with, 475- 
477; opinion of a Syrian Pncha as to En- 
gland's proper course and interest in oppo- 
sition to Russia, 477-479 ; his view of on; 
relation to Turkey and Egypt, 477-4S0; 
differences of Moslem races, 480; opinion 
of old Indiins that Indian policy should 
rule the policy of the nation, 4S1 ; advance 



Index. 



555 



of Russia watched by the natives, 481 ; ad- 
vantages to India of English government, 
if we can raise up a people that will sup- 
port our rule, 4S2, 4S3. 

India, Simla, 433; a night ride up the hills 
to, 434; languages of India, 435; dawk- 
travelling, 435 ; villages on the way, 436 ; 
aristocracy of color, 436 ; English haughti- 
ness, 436; Indian plains, 437; ruins, 437; 
wheat harvest, 437; female reapers, 437; 
jam pan-riding, 437; servants, unpleasant 
number of, 438, 439 ; thirty-five required 
for one small family in Simla, 439 ; cheap- 
ness of labor, 439, 440 ; English soldiers, 
the possibility of keeping all at hill sta- 
tions, 441 ; story-telling in the East, 441 ; 
entry to Simla, 442; the viceroy's chil- 
dren, 442 ; climate, 443 ; suitability of Sim- 
la as a refuge of the Indian Government 
from Calcutta heat, 443 ; the question of 
new "governorship-," 443; Calcutta, dis- 
advantages of, as capital, 444 ; future cap- 
ital of India, 444, 445; a suni'ise scene from 
Simla, 445 ; a fair at Simla, 450. 

, Scinde, 493 ; the Indus Valley a part 

of the great Sahara, 494; sailing on the 
Indus, 495, 406 ; a Persian's prayer on 
shipboard, 496, 497 ; shallowness of the 
river, 497 ; necessity of a safe and speedy 
road up the valley, 497 ; neglect of rail- 
ways in India, 497; need and value of 
them, 498 ; early trade between Cliina and 
Hindostan, 498 ; Sukkur, 499 ; native fish- 
ing, 499; Hydrabad, 500; Kurrachee, 500 
(see Overland Routes). 

-, Umritsur, 458; Hindoo sacred fair. 



or camp-meeting, 458 ; Sikh pilgrims on 
the way from, 458; cholera stricken, 459; 
a fearful march, 459 ; nature of the great 
gathering, 459, 460 ; a dust-storm, 460 ; 
Anglo-Indian engineering, 461 ; neglect of 
roads, 461; the Grand Trunk Railway, 
461 ; Umritsur, beauty of, 462 ; fruits, fo- 
liage, etc. 462 ; its famous roses, 462 ; the 
attar-of-roses, 462 ; Cashmere shawl man- 
ufacture, 462 ; cost of, 462 ; material, 463 ; 
the bazar, 463 ; the Sikhs, Magyar appear- 
ance of, 463; Indian and English manu- 
factures, 464; ornament, Hindoo taste with 
respect to, 465 ; the spiritual capital of the 
Sikhs, 465 ; a Sikh revival, 466 ; lis possi- 
ble consequences, 466. 

-, East, trunk railway of, SO. 



Indian customs (see Caste). 

Seas, the, 386_, 387. 

Indians of the American Plains, 87; stations 
robbed by, 88 ; a formal Indian warning to 
the white men, 88 ; a half-breed interpre- 
ter, 88; treaties with the, 89; opposition 
of, to the Pacific Railway, 89 ; the chief, 
"Spotted Dog," 89; treatment of squaws, 
93 ; and general unseemliness, 93 ; coming 
to town to be painted, 95; inferiority to 
the Indians of the Eastern States, 96; cus- 
toms similar to those of the Maories, 96 ; 
degradation of the Indian, 96 ; rapid ex- 
termination of, 97; tendency, when ap- 
parently civilized, to return to barbarism, 
98 ; rough-and-ready attempts by the En- 
glish to civilize, 98 ; consei^vative charac- 
ter of the Indian, 99 ; American treaty 
with, 99; the Indian receding before the 



English race, but victorious over the Span- 
iards, 100 ; open attempts to exterminate 
by the Coloradan Government, 100 ; gangs 
of Indians working by proxy on the rail- 
Avay, 159; Digger Indians, 159; Red Indian 
supremacy in Mexico, 202, 203. 
Irish in America, competition with the negro, 
29 ; in New York, displacing the New En 
glanders, 42, 43 ; danger to America, 4 i ; 
corruption of, in New York, 44 ; possibility 
of their retaining their hold of the Atlantic 
cities, 200 (see Fenian Brothers) ; Irishmen 
not well off in America, 214; Belfast names 
in higher esteem than Cork ones, 215 ; the 
Irish remaining in towns, and losing their 
attachment to the soil, 215; number of, 
sent to jail in America, 215 ; an Irish opin- 
ion of the thermometer, 307; Irish party 
in office in Victoria, 313 ; appointment of 
Irishmen to all police offices, 313 ; checks 
on Irish iminigration to the colonies, 329- 
332; work-house girls sent to the colonies. 
369, 360. 



J. 



Jaffa, colony founded there by New En- 
glanders, 56. 

Jamaica, homilies on the condition of, by 
Southern planters, 31. 

Japan, its probable great future, 280, 281. 

Jenny Lind, the hall where she sang on first 
landing in America, 41. 

Jockey Club, Sydney, meeting of (see Syd- 
ney). 

Johnson, President, absurdity of his policy, 
39. 



K. 



Kanby (Ceylon), the highland kingdom, and 
one of the holiest of Buddhist towns, 396 ; 
dress and appearance of the people, 397 ; 
the Upper Town one great gai-den, 397; 
tooth of Buddha, 397 ; the coffee district, 
397 ; Government Botanical Gardens — me- 
dicinal plants, 397 ; importance of the cof- 
fee-trade to Ceylon, 897 ; want of capital 
in, 398 ; Dutch system of labor, 398 ; in 
Java, 398 ; Dutch Government jobbery, 
398 ; immorality of, 399, 400 ; Ceylon pe- 
titions for self-government, 400 ; the mean- 
ing of the term, 400; small number of 
whites in the country, 400, 401 ; mountain 
scenery, 401 ; trees and foliage, 401. 

Kansas, emancipation of women in, etc. 69, 
74; parallel lines of railway in, 80; Ne- 
braska opinion of Kansas, 81 ; female suf- 
frage in, the opposite pole to Utah polyg- 
amy, 116 ; evasion of the Homestead Act 
in, 177. 

Kimball, Heber, Mormon, 118. 

King George's Sound (see Convicts). 

Kit Carson, 152. 

Kurrachee (see India — Overland Route). 



Labor in Australia, 328 ; great power of 
working-men in Australia, as compared 
with, in the United States, 328; the real 



566 



Index. 



grievance of the working-classes through- 
out the world, 32S ; laws by workmen in 
the colonies, and in those parts of America 
where they have power, to meet tlie want, 
328, 329 ; opposition of the Sydney work- 
men to both immigration and transporta- 
tion, 829 ; defense of the labor laws, 829- 
381 ; English Factory Act, a step which 
diminished the. powers of production, 331 ; 
Know-nothingism in America a protest 
against the exaggerations of free trade, 
331 ; proposals to introduce cheap labor, 
332 ; the fundamental basis of the labor 
question, 332, 333 ; our recent ridicule of the 
Chinese exclusiveness, 333 ; our present op- 
position to Chinese immigration, 334; the 
Chinese pushing to the front whenever they 
have an opportunity, 334; the colonial la- 
bor laws not unlike those of a trade-union, 
334 ; the old relation between master and 
sei-vant dying out, 335 ; new aspect of la- 
bor in accordance with democratic princi- 
ples, 335; co-operative labor supplanting 
the Middle -age system, 335; industrial 
partnerships a return to the earliest and 
noblest forms of labor, 336. 

Lahore (see India — Lahore). 

Land tenure in Australia (see Squatters and 
Democracy). 

Latin Church, the, in America, 43. 

Empire in America, 201 ; its virtual 

downfall, 201. 

Latinization, the apparent, of the English in 
America, 221. 

Launceston (see Tasmania). 

Lawrence, St., the, 57 ; Laurentian range of 
mountains, 53. 

Louisiana, banana in, 33. 

Lucknow (see India — Mohammedan Cities). 

Lynch law, where inaugurated, 160 ; Vigi- 
lance Committees, 167; great need for, in 
California, in 1848, 167 ; influx of English 
convicts and desperadoes from all parts, 
167, 168 ; first attempted action on the part 
of the people for their own protection, 168 ; 
united attempt, 169 ; trial by Lynch law, 
169, 170 ; Vigilance Committee formed, 169 ; 
its regular organization, and prompt ac- 
tion, 170 ; police show of resistance to, 
170 ; but warned away, 170 ; the trial, 170, 
and execution, 171 ; full public account of 
the circumstances, 171 ; trial and execution 
indorsed by the citizens in public meeting, 
171 ; struggle with authority — the Com- 
mittee victorious, 172 ; sending the con- 
victs back to Australia, 172 ; a fearful year 
(1855), 172 ; resolute action of the people, 
172-174 ; end of the work, 174 ; necessity 
for the action, 174 ; somewliat different ac- 
tion in Melbourne for the same purpose, 
174 ; public spirit of the people, 175 ; de- 
scendants of the justice-loving Germans, 
175 ; two memorable Lynch-law trees, 178 ; 
Vigilance Committees in Denver, Leaven- 
worth, etc. 178, 179. 



M. 



Maine Liqitoe Law, likelihood of being the 
first cause of the reaction against the now 
triumphant Radicals, 209. 



Malthusianism rejected in America, 101. 

Maori (see Race) : question of Maories being 
natives of the New Zealand soil, 246; legend 
of their flight to New Zealand, 246; Poly- 
nesian names in their language, 247 ; tra- 
ditional account of the cradle of race, 247 ; 
resemblance between, and the Red Indians 
of America, 248, 249 ; similarity of religious 
rites and social customs of, 249 ; the Malay 
race in the Pacific, 250 ; the most widely 
scattered of all the nations of the world be- 
fore the English, 250 ; the Maories, Malays, 
250 ; Malay breach of a law of nature in 
going to New Zealand, 250 ; paying the 
penalty in extinction, 250 ; Parewanui Pah, 
251; a Maori song, 251; meeting of the 
tribes to discuss with the white man a 
great question of the right to territory, 252 ; 
curious idea of the Maories as to the title 
of land, 252 ; a summons to the council, 
253 ; vigorous speeches of the chiefs, 253, 
254 ; the representative of the queen (Dr. 
Featherston) communicating with the 
chiefs, 255 ; adjournment for luncheon, 255 ; 
the Maori belief;, 255 ; views of the chiefs 
with respect to Dr. Featherston' s decision, 
256 ; business of the council resumed, 257 ; 
oratorical abuse, 257 ; breaking-up of the 
council, 257; its singular resemblance to 
the Greek Council as described by Homer, 
257, 258; alarming news of guns being sent 
for, 258 ; another general meeting of the 
tribes, 259 ; Maori names, 259 ; the queen's 
flag pulled down, 259 ; Dr. Featherston' a 
refusal to attend any debate till the flag is 
re-hoisted 259 ; an interesting voyage in an 
English ship for cannibal purposes, 259 ; the 
captain's compensation for the iise of his 
ship, 259 ; Maori dance-song, 260 ; sketch, 
ing the Maories, 260 ; native tombs, 261 ; 
apology for the pulling down of the flag^ 
261; the deed of land sale, 262 ; '^ eternal 
friendship" between the tribes, 262; the 
money sent for by Dr. Featherston, 262; 
misgivings and grief of the Maones, 262 ; 
their song of lamentation, 26^ f the money 
paid, 263; grand celebration, 263,^64; ef- 
fect of a war-dance on Lord Durham's set- 
tlers (in 1837), 265; specimens of native or- 
atory — noble speech of the chief Hunia, 265, 
266 ; a long ramble in New Zealand, 207 ; 
Maori Christianity, its hollowncss, 267 ; 
baptized oiU of the Church, 267 ; their 
Church of Englandism a failure, 267; in 
spite of the earnestness and devotion of 
missionaries, 268 ; the great outbreak, 268 : 
deserting the mission- station for the bush, 
268; a question — pork, beef, or man for 
food, 268; the Maori reply, 268; rapid 
spread of Christianity among, when first 
presented, 268 ; the native religion a vague 
polytheism, 269 ; no caste among the Ma- 
ories, 269 ; reverence for high -bora women, 
270 ; influence of women, 270 ; delicacy of 
the men toward, 270; making it possible 
for an honest Englishman to respect or love 
an honest Maori, 271 : Maori superiority to 
other native races in savage lands, 271 ; 
noble Maori trait of " proclaiming" a war 
district, and never touching an enemy, 
however defenseless, when found elsewhere, 
271 ; royal ideas of money, 271 (see Thomp- 



Index. 



657 



son, William, the Maori king-maker) ; Ma- • 
ori ability in war, 272, 273 ; their fondness 
for horses, and skill as riders, 273 ; their 
love for the sea, and possession of vessels 
on it, 273; good deep-sea fishermen, 273; 
and draught - players, 273 ; shrewd and 
thrifty, devoted friends, and brave men, 
273 ; a Maori feast and bill of fare (see Ap- 
pendix) ; their saying, '' We are gone like 
the moa " (see Flies, the two), customs of, 
413. 

Massachusetts, progress of, 54. 

Maximilian, received in Mexico by white 
men, and conquered by half-breeds, 202. 

Mayflower^ and the Pilgrim Fathers, 37, 42. 

Mayhew, Hon. Ira, work on education, 73. 

Mean Avhites, 20; controlling power of the 
South, 36. 

Melbourne (see Victoria), voyage from Mel- 
bourne to Hotikika, 235; the great gold 
mania in 1S48, 230; learned and distin- 
guished men at, 315 ; the Attorney-gener- 
al, Mr. Higginbotham, 315 ; a Government 
clerk's horror of the low pedigree of three 
ministers of state, 315; a Colonial Parlia- 
ment on its dignity, committal of a report- 
er, 315 ; his triumph, 316 ; early competi- 
tion of Melbourne and Geelong, 339. 

Mexican saddle, peculiarity of, 187. 

Mexico, coasting to, 200; Cape St. Lucas, 200 ; 
turtle and crocodile, 201 ; French army of 
occupation, 201 ; Acapulco, 201 ; anniver- 
sary of Marshal Bazaine's order du'ecting 
the execution of all Mexicans found with 
arms, 201 ; Spanish Mexico becoming Eed 
Indian, 303 ; resolution of the United States 
that Mexico shall not become a monarchy, 
303 ; the large Catholic population it would 
give in case of annexation to the Amei'ican 
Union, 204 ; beauty of the Mexican Pacific 
coast, 204. 

Michigan (see Massachusetts), University of, 
68 ; Michigan men, and maize, 68 ; democ- 
racy of the University, 69 ; government of, 
70 ; progress of the Michigan teaching sys- 
tem, 70 ; supported by the tax-payers of 
the State, 70 ; jocose reports of superintend- 
ents of schools, 71, 72 ; loyalty, 72 ; students 
sent to the war, 72 ; dislike to competitive 
honors, 72 ; practical character of, 73 ; ex- 
clusion of women from the medical schools, 
74 ; the coasts of Michigan great lakes, 79. 

*' Mint-juleps" in San Francisco — the old 
name of the town, Yerba Buena, meaning 
mint, 1S2. 

Miscegenation, French adoption of, English 
dislike to, 97. 

Mission Dolores, near San Francisco, once a 
Jesuit Mission-house, now partly a blanket 
factory and partly a church, 180. 

Missouri, law for the punishment of drunkards, 
etc., 238. 

Mohammedans (see India — Mohammedan Mo- 
hunum, and India — Mohammedan Cities). 

Mohurrum (see India). 

Monitors, American, 21. 

Monroe Doctrine, dignified action of America 
thereon, 204. 

Monroe, Fortress, 17 ; negi'oea at, 17 ; their 
tomb at, 18. 

Montreal (see Canada), 61. 

Mormons, 107 ; a camp on the way to Utah, 



108 ; Coalville, the Mormon Newcastle, 109 ; 
first sight of the Promised Land, 109 ; Jor- 
dan River, 109 ; one great field of corn and 
wheat, 110 (see Brigliam Young) ; a lady 
reading to her daughters in defense of po- 
lygamy, 110 ; first night in Utah, 111 ; arms 
at hand. 111 ; interest of the Church para- 
mount, 113 ; the Mormon constitution, 113 ; 
penalty for adultery, 114 ; kind treatmeut 
by the Mormon's, 114 ; the representative 
of Utah in Congress a monogamist, 201 ; 
anecdote of, 115; a Monnon theatre, 115; 
the women, 115, 116; unconscious melan- 
choly of, 116 ; their perfect freedom, and 
opportunity of escaping if they wished to 
do so, 116 ; defense of polygamy^ 116 ; Utah 
polygamy and Kansas female suffrage the 
opposite poles to each other, 116 (see West- 
ern Editors, Newspapers, Stenhouse, and 
Danites) ; misrepresentation of, 117; the- 
atre and church clothes, 118 ; industry, 120, 
121, 125, 126 ; natural poorness of the coun- 
try, 126 ; Mormon faith, 127 ; their belief in 
approaching danger from United States in- 
terference, 127 ; detested by New England 
and defended by the South, 128 ; evade the 
law, 129 ; democratic character of Mormon- 
ism, 131 (see Utah) ; vitality of Mormon- 
ism, 133 ; danger to it from the probable 
discovery of gold in Utah, 134; impossi- 
bility of its surviving a great inamigration; 
tliey would in that case again make their 
way to new territory, 134 (see Nauvoo). 
Moultan (see India — Native States). 



N. 



Nattvoo, the city of Joe Smith, 224 ; first set- 
tlers of, forgotten there, 224. 

Nebraska, 81. 

Negroes, gallantry of, 25; burial-place of 
5000 killed in battle, 25; our English no- 
tions of, near the truth, 27 ; love of dress, 
27 ; planters' view of freedom of, 48 ; re- 
ported negro view of monogamy, 28 ; need 
of soap, 28 ; importance of the ' ' negro ques- 
tion," 28; fallacious evidence against ne- 
groes, 28 ; driving the Irish from hotel serv- 
ice, 29 ; asking for land, 29 ; their position 
as slaves, 30 ; and as free men, 30 ; testi- 
mony of General Grant to their excellency 
as soldiers, 30 ; a negro school, 31 ; negro 
ability, 31; supei-stition, 31 ; alternative of 
ruling them by their own votes or by force, 
34 ; reading and writing bases of suffrage 
absurd, 34; co-operative labor (see Davis), 
the ballot for, 37. 

Nepaulese, the (see India — Native States). 

Nevada, its silver mines, 150. 

New Englanders, going westward, 42 ; in 
North or West, the real Amencans, 47 ; 
their affection for Harvard College, 52 ; 
earnest God-fearing principles, 55; influ- 
ence of, on the nation, 55; their lovable 
character, 57 ; dislike to Mormonism, 128 ; 
determination to put down rowdyism wher- 
ever they go, 173; wide-spread belief of, 
that the taint of alcoholic poison is hered- 
itary, 209. 

New England States, their superiority to the 
States of the South, 23 (see Southern State?, 



558 



Index. 



Western States, and Mayflower; colleges 
of, 45; population of, 54 ; debt of the Union 
to New England, 55 ; heroism of New En- 
gland, 55; poverty of the soil, 55; enter- 
prise, etc 56, 

New South Wales, convict blood in, 287 (see 
Rival Colonies) ; terrible depression of trade 
in, at present, 2SS ; causes of, 288 ; reptiles 
in, 294 (see Tasmania). 

New York, climate of, 40; strength of the 
Narrows, 40 ; un - English character, 40 ; 
sea spirit and busy life, 40 ; race, Southern, 
41; nothing of the Dutch foundation re- 
maining, 41 ; intensely Irish, 42 ; low tone 
of local Legislature, 44 ; denationalization 
of, 44 ; neglect of native colleges and pref- 
erence for foreign ones, 45; gigantic for- 
tunes in, 45 ; profligacy, petroleum, shod- 
dy, and unrest, 45, 4h ; equality and affect- 
ed dislike of democracy, 46 ; scenery of, 4T ; 
democracy of, 212. 

New Zealand (see Wellington, Ilokitika, and 
Maori), University graduates and officers 
of the British army at the diggings, 240, 
241 ; beauty and peculiarity of New Zea- 
land scenery, 242; the Taramakoo, 242; 
the Snowy Kange, 242 ; Mount RoUeston, 
242; Lake Misery, 242; plant peculiar to 
the banks of, 242 ; the Waimakiriri Valley, 
242 ; New Zealand provinces, 243 ; rivalry 
of, 243 (see Otago and Canterbury) ; cost 
of the Provincial system and Maori wars, 
244 ; consequences of the division into two 
islands, 244; rivalry of the great towns, 
245 ; karaka trees, the New Zealand sacred 
trees, 251 (see Race and Maories) ; New 
Zealand sceneiy, 267 (see Flies, the two) ; 
its chance of being the future England of 
the Pacific, 280 (see also Rival Colonies). 

Newspapers — New Orleans Tribune (negro 
paper), 35 ; British Coluvihian^ 62 ; the 
Salt Lake Telegraphy 114; the Union Ve- 
dette (Utah), 117 ; contents of the Vedette, 
118, 119 ; the great superiority of, to the 
Mormon papers, the Telegraxth and Deseret 
Neivs^ 119-122; the Denver Gazette^ etc. 
122-124; the Alta California, and jour- 
nalism under difficulties, 125, 149 ; Aeva- 
da Vnion Gazette^ 148 ; tlie San Francisco 
EuUetin, 173 ; the Sjjiritual Clarion^ 22G ; 
the Sydney Morning Herald, agents of, in- 
tercepting the mail-boat, 285; the Mel- 
hourne Argus, 300 ; the Rivcrina Herald, 
304; advertisements, paragraphs, etc. of, 
304-306 ; committal of an editor of the Mel- 
bourne Argus,Z\&\ neAvspapers in India, 
420 ; native satire of the English in, 420 ; 
the Umritsur Commercial Advertiser, 421 
(see India Gazette) ; the Dacca Prokash, 
454 ; Indian newspapers, 468, 469 ; the 
Ptmjaub Gazette, 469. 

Niagara and Chaudiere, 67, 68. 

Nitro-glycerine, dread of, in California, 186, 
1ST. 

Norfolk, second city in Virginia, 18. 

North (America), superiority of its arms dur- 
ing thi3 war, 36. 
North and South in America, the unvarying 
success of tlie former in any trial of 
strength, 78, 79. 
Norwegian population in Wisconsin, 223; 
Milwaukee a Norwegian town, 22^; Ca- 



nadian plan for a Norwegian colony on 
Lake Huron, 223. 



O. 

Ohio, beauty of scenery and wealth of soil, 
68. 

Otago (New Zealand), Presbyterian settle- 
ment, 243, 244. 

Ottawa, capital of the New Dominion, 67 ; its 
Parliament-house, 67 ; the Chaudiere Falls, 
67. 

P. 

Pacific, the, voyage across, from Panama 
to New Zealand, 229 (see Pitcairn Island); 
from Pitcairn Island, 232 : climate of, 278, 
279; unfavorable to the progress of New 
Zealand, 279 ; effect of like causes else- 
where, 279 ; coal in the, 279 ; Japan, Van- 
couver Island, and New Zealand, likely 
to rise to manufacturing greatness, 2S0; 
Christmas Day on, 282. 

Pacific Railroad, growing at the rate of two 
miles a day at one end and one mile at the 
other, 75; probable completion of it in 
1870, 75; inducements to proceed quickly 
with the work, 77 ; rapid and steady prog- 
ress westward, 77 ; armed construction- 
trains, 78 ; the great objects of the imder- 
taking, 78 ; Indian opposition to the, 89. 

Panama, character of, 228; animals and 
birds of, 282 ; scene at a railway station , 
2S2 ; prospects of Panama, 229 ; departure 
from, for AVellington, New Zealand, 289. 

Paper-money in tlie Western States of Amer- 
ica, 149, 150. 

Parewanui Pah (see Maori) . 

Parsees (see India — Bombay). 

Part y organization, despotism of, in America, 
210; secret of party power, 211, 

Pawnees, 92, 93. 

Petersburg, America, as left by the war, 22 ; 
defenses of, 24. 

Pioneer, a great, 92. 

Pioneering in Americn, 80 ; on the Plains, 87. 

Pitcairn Island, the bananartrce there, 32; 
arrival at, 230 ; visited by the people, 230 ; 
"How do you do, captain? How's Vic- 
toria?" 230; descendants of the Bounty 
mutineers, 230; Avish to submit to the cap- 
tain a case for arbitration, 2o0 ; the case 
stated for "advice," 231 ; its curious legal 
bearing, 231 ; a temporary commercial 
treaty with the islanders, 231 ; inquiry for 
English periodicals, 231 ; brandy as medi- 
cine, 231 ; the islanders strict teetotallers, 
231 ; standing out from the bay, 232. 

Pittsburg, dirt of, 68. 

Placerville, in California, 159-163, 166. 

Plains, the, out on, 87; a "sqnar' meal," 87; 
Vi^eird scene, 87 ; great distance of forts 
from each other, SS ; sitting revolver in 
hand, 80; a million companions in the lone- 
lines.a, 90 ; beauty of, 101; resemblance to 
the Tartar Plains, 102; vast extent, 102 ; 
two curses on the land — want of water, 102, 
103 ; and locusts, 103 ; feeding-ground for 
large flocks, 104. 

Planter view of negro freedom, 28; effect 



Index. 



559 



of slavery on both master and slave, 31 ; 
planters leaving the Soutli, 38. 

Plutocracy in Australia, 307, 308 (see Squat- 
ter). 

Point du Galle (see Maritime Ceylon). 

Polygamy in India, 455 ; polyandry, 456 ; po- 
lygny, 45G-458. 

Polynesians, Malay origin of, 246-250 (see 
Kace and Maori); rapid spread of Chris- 
tianity among, 268 ; the Maori religion com- 
mon to all Polynesians, 269 ; a vague poly- 
theism in the songs, seeming to approach 
pantheism, 269; difference between the 
Maories and other Polynesians, 269. 

Poonah (see the Mohammedan Mohurrum). 

I'otomac, 40. 

Prairie-dogs, for food, 88 ; on the Plains, 90. 

Prairie flowers, 93, 94. 

Protection to native industry in the colonies, 
320, 321 ; the squatters alone in favor of 
free trade, 321 ; defense of protection by 
the diggers, 322; its self-denying charac- 
ter, 322 : defended on different gi-ounds in 
Australia and America, 322, 323 ; grand- 
eur of the willingness to sacrifice private 
interest that a nation may be built up, 323 ; 
protection to a great degree a revolt against 
steam, 324; American defense of, as a ne- 
cessity to a young nation, 324; and as a se- 
curity against the pauper labor of Europe, 
325; "No America without protection," 
326 ; eagerness for, in Victoria, 327 ; Amer- 
ican admission of the economical argu- 
ment, but assertion that political objec- 
tions overweigh it, 328 ; protection not the 
doctrine of a clique, but a nation, 328. 

Pyramids, the, 539. 

Q. 

Qfebec, terrace at, 57 ; change of scene from 
the States, 57 ; strength of the French pop- 
ulation, 58 ; customs and feelings of Old 
France, 58 ; the ouly true French colony 
in the world, guarded by English troops 
against the inroads of the English race, 59 ; 
contrast with English energy, 60; climate 
of Quebec, 60; nortlieru lights, 60; the 
oppressive monopoly of the Hudson's Bay 
Company, 60. 

Queensland (see Rival Colonies and Squat- 
ters) ; question of the cultivation of a trop- 
ical country not yet settled, 291; little 
hope of the colored races being received on 
equal terms of citizenship, 292 ; physical 
condition of the colonists on the Downs and 
in Brisbane, 297 ; population of (from 1860 
to 1806), 332. 

R. 

Race, war of, in America, 221 ; in New Zea- 
land, 221 ; in Mexico, 221 ; disappearance 
of physical type, 222 (see Saxon and Latin 
Races) ; gradual destruction of races, the 
bearing of, on religion, 224 (see English 
Race) ; pi-obable opposition of the Victori- 
ans to the Queensland colonists availing 
themselves of the labor of the dark-skinned 
races, 291 ; unfairness of the planters to 
the dark-skins, 292; danger of peonage, 



Rail and river, 80 ; railways in America pre- 
ceding population, 80; converging lines 
and parallel lines, 80, 83. 

Ranchmen, cooks, and hostlers, 141 ; their 
roughness, 142: dislike to ^'•biled shirts," 
142. 

Red Indians (see Indians). 

Representation in the Northern and South- 
ern States, 35. 

Reptiles, in New South Wales, 294; Tas- 
mania, S50 ; a snake story, 350. 

Republican party in the United States, com- 
plete organization and great power of, 212. 

Rhode Island, smallness of territory and 
population, 51. 

Richmond, 22; defenses of, 24; future pros- 
pects of, 26: Washington's statue in, 26; 
Hollywood Cemetery, 27. 

Riley, Fort, the centre of the United States, 
84. 

Rival colonies and towns — Australia and New 
Zealand, 293; New Zealand hitherto main- 
ly aristocratic. New South Wales and Vic- 
toria democratic, 283; separation of New 
Zealand and Australia by a wide ocean, 
283; New Zealand presenting to Australia 
a rugged coast, while her ports and baya 
are turned toward America and Polynesia, 
284 ; difference of climate, 284 ; energy of 
the Australians as compared with the su- 
pineness of the New Zealanders, 285; dif- 
ferent appearance of the people in the two 
colonies, 286 ; New South Wales, Queens- 
land, Victoria, 288; probable wide polit- 
ical differences in the future, 290 (see Squat- 
ters) ; Sydney and Melbourne, 297 ; rivalry 
of, 297 ; seasons in New Zealand and Aus- 
tralia, 306 ; climate, S07 ; the question of 
confederation of the Pacific colonies, 353; 
willingness of the colonies for free trade 
with each other, 352 ; postal and customs 
union, 352 ; difficulties in the way of con- 
federation, 352; choice of future capital, 
352 ; desirability of selecting some obscure 
village, and not a great town, 352 ; the 
bearing of confederation on imperial inter- 
ests, 352; and on colonial ones, 353; our 
duty in case it should lead to independence, 
354. 

Riverina, the (see Victoria and Newspapers). 

Rockwell, Poi'ter, 135, 136; death of Captain 
Gunnison, of the Federal Engineers, near 
Rockwell's house, 140. 

Rocky Mountains, 76 : sublime view of, from 
Denver, 94; Black Mountains, 105; the 
Wind River Chain, etc. 105 ; dreaded al- 
kali dust of the desei't, 106; a fine scene, 
108; the Elk Monntains, 108; game, etc. 
108 ; Rocky Mountain plateau, 108 ; soli- 
tude of, 108 ; sudden arrival by night at a 
Mormon camp, 108 ; a Mormon welcome, 
108 ,- Echo Canon, 109. 

Rowdyism in the West, put down by the God- 
fearing New Englanders, 178. 

Russia (see India — Russian approach to). 



Sacramento, 16G; the Sacramento River, 
166. 

San Francisco, its future connection with Eu- 
rope by means of the Pacific Railway, T8 



560 



Index. 



(see Golden City) ; its claim to be one of 
the cliief stations of the Anglo-Saxon high- 
way round the world, 195; remarks on its 
probable future, 196-1?9. 

San Francisco and Chicago, the cosmopolitan- 
ism of, compared, 2'24. 

San Jose, " the Garden City," 187. 

Sandhurst, 300, 301;* aspect and cliaracterof 
the town, 301 ; the '■'■ Government Reserve," 
301 ; Chinese clerks and diggers, bOl ; un- 
just treatment of, 301, 302. 

Sandridgd (see Victorian Ports). 

Saxon and Latin races in America (see West- 
ern States), sharp conflict between, 180. 

Saxon, the, the only extirpating race on 
earth, 221. 

Scinde (see India). 

Scotch, the (sea India, Bombay). 

Sei-vants, in India, 438, 430. 

Sierra Nevada, 152; its grim aspect, 153; 
and obstacles to travelling westward, 153, 
155, 156. 

Sikhs (see India — Umritsur). 

Simla (see India). 

Slavery, effects of, 81 ; a slaver, 56, 57. 

South Australia, 357, 358. 

Southern States, planters of, formerly rulers 
of America, 20 ; disunion of society, during 
the war, 36 ; hatred to the New England 
States, 37, 38. 

South America, society of, disorganized, 29 ; 
injurious effect on, of the banana- tree grow- 
ing wild, and offering food Avithout labor, 
3-2, 33. 

Sphinx, the, 474. 

Spiritualism (see Churches in America). 

Squatters, the, tenants of the Crown land in 
Queensland, 290 ; struggle in Victoria be- 
tween, and the agricultural democracy, 
290 ; the monopolization of land discour- 
aged by the democracy, 298; the squatter 
aristocracy, 308 ; meaning of the term, 
308 ; the squatter the nabob of Sydney and 
Melbourne, 303 ; squatter complaints, 309 ; 
what the townsmen think of, 309 ; evils of 
the squatter system, 309 ; almost entire ap- 
propriation of the lands in Victoria, 310 ; 
colonial democracy, perception by, of the 
dangers of the land monopoly, 310 ; popu- 
lar movement for the nationalization of 
land, 310; Radical legislation against land 
monopoly, 310 ; the squatter denunciation 
of, 311 ; his right to impound cattle, 311 ; 
interest of Victoria in putting down the 
monopoly, 311, 312. 

Stenhouse, Elder, the Mormon, 111 ; his an- 
swer to the question, " Has Brighara's elec- 
tion ever been opposed ?" 112 ; postmaster, 
117 ; denounced by the Vedette newspaper, 
117 ; editor of the TelegrapJi, 117 ; dislike 
to jokes, 118; Artemus Ward's joke to, 
118; Stenhouse's opinion of Mormon and 
Welsh coal, 126 ; his rebuke of the author, 
127. 

Suffrage, negi'o, reading and writing basis 
for, 34. 

Sukkur (see India — Scinde). 

Sydney, 282; arrival off the "Heads," 285; 
Sydney Cove, 285 ; appearance of the town, 
285; the Midsummer Meeting of the Syd- 
ney Jockey Club on New Year's Day, 286 ; 
appearance of the ladies on the grand 



stand, 286 ; the youngpeople, 286; no trace 
of convict blood in the faces on the i"ace- 
course, 287: the last of the bush-rangers, 
287; English fruits, foliage, etc., 287; 
heat, succeeded by a gale, '^87; wealth in 
coal, 292, '293 ; the city of pleasure, 294 ; 
tendency of the colonists to rush to towns 
to spend their money, 293, 294 (see Rival 
Colonies); opposition of the operative 
classes of, to immigration and transporta- 
tion, 329, 330 ; University of, 376, 377. 



Taj Mahal (see India — Mohammedan Cities 
—Agra). 

Tasmania, pleasant climate of, 342 ; English 
sceueiy, 342 ; and homes, etc. 342 ; Maria 
Van Diemen's Land, 342; tlie Tamar River, 
C42' Launceston, 342 ; southward to Hobar- 
ton, 342; deserted and disheartening state 
of the coHutry, 342 ; bountifulaess of na- 
ture, 343 ; great number of naturalized 
fruits, etc. 343; the Ireland of the South, 
343; the almost abandoned harbor of lio- 
barton, £43 ; blight of the convict settle- 
ment, 343; total extirpation of the abo- 
rigines, 343 ; slight increase of population 
in the colony, 845 ; iron and coal abundant, 
but seldom worked, 345; consumption of 
spirits in, 345 ; lotus-eating, 345 ; the land 
not yet free from traces of convict blood, 
345 ; fearful character of convict punish- 
ment, 346 ; testimony of a Catholic bishop 
respecting, 346 ; deeds of the Pierce-Green- 
liill party, 343 ; Mr. Frost at Port Arthur, 
347 ; the convict system as viewed in the 
colony, 347 ; "• Tasmanian bolters," 347 ; 
objections to convicts entering the free col- 
onies, 347; advantages reaped by colonists 
from convict labor, 347; the Australian 
colonies planted as convict settlements, 
348 ; threats of tlie Victorians (and in old 
times tlie Virginians) to retaliate for the 
shipment to them of convicts, 348 ; Tas- 
manian society, 348; and goveniment, 
348 ; working of the ballot, 349 ; a ride to 
see the naturalized salmon, 349; the sal- 
mon madness, 350 ; causing the destruction 
of all indigenous birds, 350 ; and has in- 
troduced the British wasp in the ova, 350 ; 
reptiles, 3.50; moonlight in Tasmania, 351. 

Teetotallers (see Pitcairn Island). 

Telegrapli, the, in the American desert, 106. 

Territories, the, their capabilities, 113. 

Thompson, William, the Maori king-maker, 
272 ; his dress and high character, 277 ; 
true patriotism, 277 ; insulted whenever he 
entered an English town, 278; his death, 
278 

Thugs, New Zealand, 239, 240, 242. 

Toronto (see Canada). 

Transportation (see Convicts), 



U. 

UjrBiTSUE (see India). 

'Uncle Sam's money," opinions of how it 

goes, 209. 
University, English, men at the New Zealand 

diggings, 240, 241. ' 



Index. 



5G1 



Utah, 127 ; first occupation of, 129 ; annexed 
to the Union, 129 ; tlieories of annexation, 
129 ; approach of the Pacific Railway, 130 ; 
intended to put down Mormonism, 130 ; 
the Mormons will not defend their couu- 
try, but retreat and pioneer the way for 
further English settlements, 130; the jus- 
tice or injustice of interference, 132, 133. 



Van Diemen'8 Land (see Tasmania). 

Vancouver Island (see Pacific). 

Victoi'ia (see Rival Colonies), the smallest of 
our Southern colonies except Tasmania, 
295 ; and the wealthiest, 296 ; settlement 
(in 1S35) on the site where Melbourne now 
stands, 296 ; populatiou of Melbourne, 296 ; 
buildings, railroad, income, and debt of 
Victoria, 296 ; talent and energy brought 
in by the rush for gold, 296 ; public spirit 
of the people, 296; more Englisli, not more 
American, than the people of New South 
Wales, 297 ; effect of the gold discoveries, 
29S ; discouragement, by the Democrats, 
of the monopolization of land, 29S ; popu- 
lation of, now stationary, 298 ; admirable 
system of statistics, 298 ; statistical history 
of, 299 ; three staples of, 299 ; from Mel- 
bourne to Kyneton, 299; harvest work in 
Victoria, 299; the "Tliistle Prevention 
Act," 299 ; agricultural villages, 299 ; the 
towns of Castlemaine and Sandhurst (see 
Sandhurst), 300 ; a praire-fire, 303 ; the 
Murray River, 304 ; its insignificance as a 
river, 394; but importance to commerce, 
304; the ''Riverina," 304; territory in- 
cluded in it, 304 ; nature of productions as 
shown by the newspapers, 304r-306 ; sea- 
sons and climate, 306, 307 ; plutocracy in, 
307 (see Squatter) ; Upper House of, going 
into committee on its own constitution, 
313; probability of its disappearance, 313; 
class animosity in, 315; education in, 316, 
317 ; protection to industry in, 321-327. 

Victorian Ports — Williamstown, Sandridge, 
and Geelong, 339 ; early prospects and 
present ruinous state of Geelong, 331 ; rid- 
icule of, at Melbourne, 339; fine country 
round Geelong, 340 ; wheat and vines of, 
340; Ballarat, 340; mining district around, 
340 ; names of places at the mines, a chro- 
nological guide to date of settlement, 341 ; 
climatic changes, 341. 

Vigilance Committees in Western America 
(see Lynch Law) ; San Francisco and the 
Sandwich Islands, 179. 

Virginia, approach to, 17 ; opinions in, respect- 
ing the war, 19 ; rivers and mineral wealth 
of, 23 ; in production inferior to poorer 
states, 23 ; competition of white and black 
labor in, 33. 

Virginia City, arrival at, 145 ; an unsatisfac- 



toiy governor, 146; dancing-rooms, 147; 
substitution for ladies, 147 ; peculiarities 
of climate, 147; whisky-shops, 148 ; Arte- 
mus Ward's opinion of, 148. 
Vii-ginian twilight and scenery, 21. 

W. 

Washington, first view of, 40. 

Washoe, in Nevada, its reputation, 146. 

Wellington, 232, 233 ; fruit and flowers of, 
233 ; cattle-branding with an old college 
friend, 233. 

West (America), future capital of 80 ; empire, 
setting towai-d the, 83-85; plains of the, 
85 ; men and women of, their dignity, 
etc. 141 ; power of sheriff in, 176; qualifi- 
cations for a sheriff, 170. 

West Honduras, 220. 

Western States (of America) growing more 
English, while the Atlantic States are fall- 
ing into the hands of the Irish, 42, 43 ; 
Western perception of the dangers from 
Irish preponderance on the Atlantic sea^ 
board, 43 ; wideness of Western thought, 
83 ; advantages of the Western over the 
Eastern States, 84 ; Western objection to 
greenbacks, 149 ; agreement to accept 
forged notes if well done, 149 ; fancy for 
classical names, 161 ; honesty, 185. 

Western editors, 117; Connor, a Fenian 
editor of the IFnion Vedette^ 117; his de- 
nunciation of Mormonism, 117 ; an editor's 
room in Denver, 125; influence of Con- 
nor, 125 ; " wasp-like " pertinacity of the 
Vedette. 127 ; injury done by it to liberty 
of thought throughout the world, 127 ; ed- 
itors in America as a rule foreigners, and 
mostly Irishniip, 148 ; editorial inquiry 
for " Tennyson and Tliomas T. Carlyle," 
148; murder of James King, 173 ; an edi- 
tor's story, 176. 

Williamstown (see Victorian Ports). 

Winthrop, Governor, founder of Plymouth, 
Mass., 17. 

Wisconsin (see Norwegian). 

Wolf, a white, 91. 

Woman, in Victoria, 336 ; female suffrage, 
336; social position of, bad both in En- 
gland and Australia, 336 ; superiority of, 
in Western States of America, 337; a 
Kansas argumei for soman's rights, 237; 
disproportion of the sexes in the Australian 
colonies, 337 ; the Amei-ican Sewing Clubs 
during the war, 337; woman's place 
among the British section of the Teutonic 
race, 338, 339 ; want of, in young coun- 
tries, 358, 359 ; Irish work-house girls sent 
to the colonies, 359, 360 ; their bad cliarac- 
ter and influence, 360. 

Y. 

YOKKTOWN, ancient memories of, 17. 



THE END. 
Aa2 



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